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The Crusades

AN EPITOME

Susanna Throop

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Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

The Crusades

AN EPITOME

Susanna A. Throop

Libera Scientia | Free Knowledge

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

The Crusades: An Epitome
by Susanna A. Throop

Epitomes, 4
Series Editors: Tim Barnwell & N. Kivilcim Yavuz

Published in 2018

by Kismet Press LLP

Kismet Press LLP

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Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

For S. Ross Doughty
&
Reverend Charles William Rice
(1957-2017)

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Contents

List of Maps ix
Acknowledgements xi
Note on Terminology and Usage xiii

Introduction: What Were the Crusades? 1

I Connections and Conflicts in the
Eleventh-Century Mediterranean 13

II Constructing the First Crusade:
Contexts, Events, and Reactions 43

Il Shifting Ground: Crusading and
the Twelfth-Century Mediterranean 73

IV Allies and Adversaries: Crusading
Culture and Intra-Christian Crusades 99

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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vi | THE CRUSADES

V_ Changing Circumstances:
Crusading in the Thirteenth Century 129

VI Towards Christian Nationalism:
Crusading into the Early Modern Period 153

Conclusion: Have the Crusades Ended? 177
Index 187

Credits 195

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

List of Maps

Map 1.1. Eastern Hemisphere, 1000, p. 15.

Map 1.2. Eastern Mediterranean, 1000, p. 21.

Map 1.3. Eastern Mediterranean, 1090, p. 25.

Map 1.4. Iberian Peninsula and Western
Mediterranean, 1000, p. 27.

Map 1.5. Iberian Peninsula and Western
Mediterranean, 1090, p. 29.

Map 2.1. Waves of the First Crusade, 1096-99, p. 53.

Map 2.2. Crusader States, 1110, p. 61.

Map 3.1. Byzantine Empire and the Crusader
States, 1143, p.77.

Map 3.2. Territory Held by Zangi and Nur al-Din,
p. 81.

Map 3.3. Western Mediterranean, 1100, p. 85.

Map 4.1. Latin Empire and Other Latin Holdings,
1204-61, p. 119.

Map 4.2. Southern France before and after the
Albigensian Crusade, 1209 and 1229,
p. 121.

Map 4.3. Imperial Holdings and Allies, 1250, p. 125.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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x | THE CRUSADES

Map S.1. Latin Expansion in the Baltic Region,
1200-1300, p. 133.

Map 5.2. Iberian Peninsula, 1252, p. 135.

Map 5.3. Byzantine Empire, 1261, p. 139.

Map 5.4. Mamluk Sultanate, 1260, p. 147.

Map 5.5. Eastern Mediterranean, 1300, p. 149.

Map 6.1. Black Death, 1346-53, p. 157.

Map 6.2. Europe and the Mediterranean, 1400,
p. 165.

Map 6.3. Ottoman Empire, 1566, p. 169.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Acknowledgements

My THANKS GO FIRST TO KISMET PRESS, IN PARTICULAR
my editor, Tim Barnwell, and Kivilcrm Yavuz. I deeply
appreciate both their commitment to scholarly Open
Access publishing and the ease and pleasure of working
with them. Generous thanks, too, to Ursinus College,
which greatly expedited the writing of the book by
providing a sabbatical semester, to the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation and Gates Cambridge Scholarship
Programme, which enabled my graduate education , and
to Jonathan Riley-Smith (1938-2016), PhD supervisor,
mentor, and inspiration, who is always in my thoughts. I
would particularly like to thank Ross Doughty, who has
unfailingly celebrated my research and writing as a senior
colleague and former department chair, and Charles
Rice, who by word and example urged me to use my
voice and inspired me to be my best self. I am indebted
to them both. I am likewise deeply grateful to Morgan
Larese and Elijah Sloat, my research assistants, and to the
Ursinus College Student Research Assistantships in the

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

xu | THE CRUSADES

Humanities Program that supported their work. Morgan
and Elijah helped me conceptualize and plan the book
and their active collaboration, insightful questions, and
critical feedback were invaluable.

A book like this that attempts to range so widely can
only be written with content and insight from many,
many others. This book rests on the scholarship of others
and, equally, on the generous feedback of colleagues
who took the time to read drafts and help me improve
and correct the book. My heartfelt thanks go to Megan
Cassidy-Welch, Peter Frankopan, Matthew Gabriele,
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Jonathan Harris, Norman
Housley, Katherine Lewis, Elizabeth Macaulay Lewis,
Helen Nicholson, Nicholas Morton, Carol Symes, and
Christopher Tyerman, as well as to my anonymous peer
reviewer, who was clearly (and thankfully) a historian
of the Islamic world. To review a book manuscript as
they did requires time, energy, and goodwill, and I’m
profoundly grateful and humbled that they helped me
make this book better. Any and all errors, infelicities, and
authorial choices are fully my own.

Every day I am grateful to my family for the love and
happiness of our life together which also made this book
possible. My love and appreciation go to my spouse,
Matthew Abbott, to our three cats, Gemma, Rowan, and
Sydney, and to all the members of my extended family
who share laughter, love, and encouragement.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Note on Terminology
and Usage

ALL DATES PROVIDED WITHIN THE BOOK ARE COMMON
Era (CE) unless otherwise noted. Place names are given
in modern English. Personal names have been simplified,
standardized, and transliterated; I have minimized the use
of non-Latin symbols and have only used words in their
original language when to translate them would obscure
meaning. My hope is that these measures help make this
book accessible for an English-reading general audience.

I have tried to be as precise and consistent as possible
in describing peoples, regions, polities, and religions.
The task has not been easy, since our modern categories
for identity and geography do not map smoothly onto
the past. Furthermore, medieval cultural, religious, and
political identities did not necessarily align neatly with
each other.

Ihave aimed to describe political powers as specifically
as possible, and when discussing broader regional trends,

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Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

xiv | THE CRUSADES

to use basic, though modern, geographical terms—i.e.,
northeastern Europe, north Africa, west Asia, eastern
Mediterranean, and so on. Thus “Europe” always means
the continent and “Latin Christian” always means the
religion and neither term should be read as shorthand
for the other, nor for race or other identity categories.
Similarly “Iberia” refers to the geographical area of the
Iberian Peninsula and “Anatolia” to the geographical
area of the Anatolian peninsula; neither implies a specific
religious, ethnic, or political unit.

When it comes to religious identity, writing from my
own perspective asa historian, I discuss “Latin Christians”
(i.e., members of the church of Rome) and “Byzantine
Christians” as well as “Christian ‘heretics”” “Heretics”
is almost always in quotation marks to signal that the
accuracy of the term depends heavily on perspective.
“Islam,” “Muslim,” and “Islamic” refer to the religion,
while “Islamicate” refers to regions, groups, or polities
in which Muslims (of whatever ethnicity or culture)
were politically dominant. “Christendom” refers to the
medieval concept of an ideal Christian society, a fully
unified and homogenous politico-religious community.

There isa strong case to be made for using the (multiple)
medieval terms for regions and locations, and there is
an equally strong case for acknowledging that there are
different traditions of geographic terminology around
the world. However, given the plurality of perspectives
I am attempting to synthesize, and thus the possibility
of having to explain multiple names for each location,
such an approach seemed inadvisable for a book of this
length. I encourage all readers to explore elsewhere the

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY AND USAGE | Xv

rich and varied legacies of place names, personal names,
and identity categories present in both the premodern
and modern worlds.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Introduction:
What Were the
Crusades?

“As the poster conflict of civilizational clash, the
history of the Crusades is an ideal subject for the
foregrounding of [an informed dialogue between the
West and the Muslim world]. In the final analysis,
civilizations are not monoliths pitting different cultures
in mutually antagonistic postures but a shifting

»Y]

landscape of units that cooperate or clash.

THE FIRST CRUSADE (1096-99) MARCHED OVERLAND
from Europe to the eastern Mediterranean, where its
participants conquered the city of Jerusalem by force.

1 Umej Bhatia, Forgetting Osama bin Munqidh, Remembering
Osama bin Laden: The Crusades in Modern Muslim Memory
(Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies,
2008), 65.

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2 | THE CRUSADES

These first crusaders established a number of small states
in the region, which they then struggled to defend and
expand. As years, decades, and centuries rolled by, some
sought to emulate the crusaders, while others in turn
resisted their efforts. All the while, a variety of different
voices strove to explain, celebrate, or condemn those who
claimed to crusade.

Put that way, the history of the crusades seems
remarkably simple. But in fact, the history of the crusades
is complex and contested. It is contested in the twenty-first
century; it was contested in the eighteenth, nineteenth,
and twentieth centuries; and as this book demonstrates,
it was contested in the twelfth century. While the events
of the crusades may be relatively easy to pin down, the
meanings ascribed to those events are slippery indeed.
As a result, it is impossible to discuss the history of the
crusades without discussing the nature of historical
knowledge, as well as how the crusades have become so
central and yet so disputed in modern conversations.

To begin, then, historians are unable to directly access
the past. In the case of the First Crusade, for example,
we cannot ourselves see Jerusalem conquered in 1099 or
know with absolute certainty what passed in the minds
of those who were there. We have access, instead, to a
variety of different forms of historical evidence—texts,
physical objects, architecture, archaeological remains.
This evidence is always incomplete, due to the physical
ravages of time and environment as well as decisions
about what to keep and what to toss made by previous
generations. The evidence is also always biased—that is, it
reflects the perspectives of those who shaped it. After all,

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Wuat WERE THE CRUSADES? | 3

what we consider “historical evidence” was created to suit
the wants and needs of its own time, not the priorities or
perspectives of modern historians. Thus, while historians
like to make claims about what “the evidence says,”
evidence always has to be interpreted, and it rarely speaks
with a singular voice.

The task of the historian, then, is to ask questions
about the past and to arrive at an answer based upon
an interpretation of as much evidence as possible.
Interpretations that are supported by the widest range
of evidence and accepted by the overwhelming majority
of historians—that are virtually incontrovertible—are
deemed historical fact. Interpretations that are more
recent or less widely accepted, or simply cannot be
conclusively confirmed, are historical arguments. Thus
historical knowledge, our understanding of the past,
changes over time as historians accept or reject arguments,
find new evidence, interpret old evidence differently, and
ask other questions.

While historians strive for objectivity and transparency,
both the questions they ask and the way they interpret
evidence are unavoidably influenced by their own social
context as well as their personal background. As a
result, historical knowledge depends upon not only the
intellectual rigor and ethics of individual historians, but
also the commitment of historians, as a whole, to critical
analysis and counterargument. History isn’t written in
stone, but neither is it an assortment of personal opinions;
rather, it is a rigorous and ongoing attempt to understand
the past on its own terms. The critical rigor of the field—
including a commitment to avoid anachronism, nostalgia,

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4 | THE CRUSADES

and teleology—distinguish the study of history from
general social memory. That historians, as human beings,
do not always live up to these high expectations does not
alter the fact that the expectations are firmly in place.

What does all this have to do with the crusades?
Let’s start with the term “crusade.” The Latin term that
can be translated as “crusader” first appears circa 1200,
a century after the First Crusade. Even then, the Latin
term—and its vernacular equivalents—were not always
used consistently; one historical source might refer to
“crusaders” while another might not. Admittedly, there
can be a distinct phenomenon without a correlating term,
and historians can study something that was not discretely
identified in its own time. For example, a historian might
analyze the “economic implications of tax reform” within
a past society that never itself explicitly considered “the
economic implications of tax reform,” and that might not
even have had a concept of “economics” as a distinct aspect
of human life. Similarly, we can study “crusades” even if
there was no term for it at a given moment, provided we
agree on what “crusades” were. That last clause is key:
any attempt to study the crusades, or tell the story of the
crusades, is unavoidably based on historical arguments
about what the crusades were. These arguments have
been heated in part because the historical evidence is
diverse and (of course) open to interpretation.

But historical arguments about the crusades have also
been heated because the arguments have been politically
charged and intimately connected to the perspectives and
priorities of scholars and their times. For example, for
David Hume, an eighteenth-century British intellectual,

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Wuat WERE THE CRUSADES? | 5

the crusades were the worst example of irrational zealotry
that he believed preceded Europe’s Enlightenment; for
him, the crusades were “the most signal and most durable
monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any
age.”? In contrast, for Joseph Michaud, a nineteenth-
century French historian, the crusades were a glorious
and heroic national enterprise that did (and should) fuel
French patriotism.’ Both Michaud and Sayyid Qutb, a
mid-twentieth-century Egyptian intellectual, linked the
crusades to modern European imperialism, but while
Michaud celebrated this, Qutb condemned it.*

Such connections between historians’ own societies,
identities, and arguments, and the political charge that
accompanies history, is not surprising—history is written
by human beings—but it is worth noting. Because of
these connections, the history of the crusades has been
linked variously to nationalism, imperialism, irrationality,
and racism, as well as to heroism, glory, piety, and
triumphalism. As scholar and diplomat Umej Bhatia has
noted, the crusades continue to be seen as the “poster
conflict” for an incredibly wide variety of polemical

2 David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of
Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James the Second, 1688
(Boston: Aldine Book Publishing, 1754-61), 226.

3 Joseph Francois Michaud, The History of the Crusades, trans.
William Robson, 3 vols. (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son,
1900), 1: 257.

4 Sayyid Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, trans. John B. Hardie,
rev. ed. (Oneonta: Islamic Publications International, 2000),
269.

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6 | THE CRUSADES

positions, all based on the idea of a seemingly eternal,
inescapable, and historically inaccurate “civilizational
clash.”> Thus, the crusades can be invoked so variously and
debated so heatedly precisely because of their malleability,
and because of their ability to represent many different
conjunctions of religion, violence, nationalism, and
identity. This is the intense context in which the history of
the crusades has been studied and written.

This is also the intense context in which this book has
been written, and it has led me to not only make quite
specific authorial choices, but to consider it imperative to
communicate those choices to you, my readers, as clearly
as I can. After all, any historical narrative is a combination
of historical facts and historical arguments, and the
specific combination depends upon the author’s purpose.
But this is especially true for a book such as this, which
seeks to summarize centuries of hotly contested history in
avery few pages. Writing this book has inevitably required
that I make tough decisions about what to include and
exclude, and I want to be direct about the arguments that
I have used to build this book’s narrative.

To begin, and to return to the problem of defining
“crusades,” this book is premised upon a pluralist
definition of crusading. Pluralism, a school of thought
outlined by historian Jonathan Riley-Smith among others,

5 Bhatia, Forgetting Osama bin Mungidh, Remembering
Osama bin Laden, 65. The idea of this civilizational clash
is represented in Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1996).

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Wuat WERE THE CRUSADES? | 7

reflects one of the biggest turns in the academic study
of the crusades in the late twentieth century. Pluralism
asserts that crusades were a subcategory of Christian holy
war, which was in turn a subcategory of Christian just war.
Crucially, it asserts that crusades could be distinguished
from other Christian holy and just wars not by geography,
target, or chronology, but rather by a number of key
procedural elements, such as papal authorization. Thus,
from a pluralist perspective, the crusades were not
simply about Christians fighting Muslims for control of
Jerusalem. Instead, as this book emphasizes, crusades
were fought against Muslims, pagans, purported heretics,
and political adversaries of the papacy, and crusades
were fought around the Mediterranean, in Europe, and
in Africa. In addition, while Jerusalem clearly served as
both a literal and symbolic goal for many crusaders, it
was not a sine qua non for crusading. Having said all that,
pluralism does not noticeably distinguish this book from
others, since at this point in time, a pluralist definition of
crusading has been largely accepted by scholars.

What is more distinctive about this book is a central
focus on historical complexity. Attention to complexity
has guided my authorial decisions in three key ways.
First, I have adopted a more global and less Eurocentric
perspective on the crusades. In other words, I have
aimed to locate crusading within the broader history of
the eastern hemisphere, particularly the Mediterranean
region, and to incorporate evidence and perspectives
from different medieval cultures and historical traditions.
Second, I have striven to acknowledge the diversity of
historical actors and perspectives, to underline both

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8 | THE CRUSADES

continuity and change, and to firmly push against any idea
of historical inevitability. Third, and following on this,
one of the book’s overall claims is that while there have
been voices describing crusading as an epic “civilizational
clash” since the eleventh century, equally there has always
been another history visible and articulated by historical
sources—one characterized by diplomacy, strategy,
rhetoric, Realpolitik, exchange, conflict, transaction—
in other words, a history colored in a wide spectrum
of grays. Modern accounts of crusading are varied and
contested, but so too were perspectives on crusading in
the Middle Ages.

Attention to complexity has furthermore led to two
characteristics of this book that should be highlighted
in advance. This is not a military history of the crusades.
You will learn here about an ambiguous and evolving
phenomenon—“crusading”—rather than a series of
discrete military campaigns. Similarly, while I do indicate
in passing the nineteenth-century European numbering
of crusades—First Crusade, Second Crusade, and so
on—I do not otherwise use these numerical labels, with
the exception of the First Crusade. On the one hand, I
accept there is sufficient historical evidence to continue
to represent the expedition of 1096-99 as a pivotal
moment in the history of Christian warfare. On the other
hand, the nineteenth-century numbering of crusades
is potentially quite misleading when combined with a
pluralist approach.

The net result of my attention to complexity is a
new narrative history of the crusades. In terms of the
book’s structure, the chapters are balanced in length and

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Wuat WERE THE CRUSADES? | 9

proceed in loose chronological order. Chapter 1 explores
the eastern hemisphere, Mediterranean, and Europe
in the eleventh century to establish a broad context for
the First Crusade. Chapter 2 analyzes the events of the
First Crusade, as well as reactions to it, up to the mid-
twelfth century. Chapter 3 puts crusading in the eastern
Mediterranean into broader context by situating it within
ongoing regional developments. Chapter 4 dives more
deeply into Christendom, outlining key cultural themes
in crusading and clarifying the role of intra-Christian
crusades. Chapter 5 returns to the Mediterranean, a
region in flux once again thanks to the arrival of new
actors, while Chapter 6 showcases the persistent nature of
crusading and its relationship with early modern Christian
nationalism in Europe. In the conclusion, I briefly visit
the various images of the crusades that have been invoked
into the twenty-first century and make a final case for the
value of historical complexity.

Each chapter begins with a short introduction that
summarizes the previous chapter and outlines the main
points to come. In line with the format of this book series,
footnotes have been deliberately kept extremely minimal
and instead, a short (and not comprehensive) list for
suggested further reading is provided at the end of each
chapter. Maps have been provided to support points made
by the text. The length of the book corresponds to the
standards of this book series; its length makes it inevitable
that I will have left out things that matter to some and
included things that seem less important to others. In
making final revisions on a short timeline, regrettably I
have been unable to incorporate a number of recent and

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10 | THE CRUSADES

pertinent publications, most especially Michael Lower’s
The Tunis Crusade of 1270 and Geraldine Heng’s The
Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, which
includes a chapter related to the crusades.°

Furthermore, while I have done my very best to limit
extraneous detail and unnecessary jargon, the book has
been written with the assumption that you, my readers,
are both intelligent and curious, and that most of you will
be readily able and willing to access additional information
online or in print. In other words, my hope is not that
you read this book in isolation or as a sole authority, but
rather, that it inspires you to seek out further knowledge
and different perspectives, to engage in dialogue with
others about the material, and to ask your own questions
about the history of the crusades.

6 Michael Lower, The Tunis Crusade of 1270: A Mediterranean
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Geraldine
Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

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WHat WERE THE CRUSADES? | 11

Further Reading

Housley, Norman. Contesting the Crusades. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2006.

Riley-Smith, Jonathan. What Were the Crusades? 4th
ed. San Francisco, Basingstoke, and New York:
Ignatius Press and Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

Tyerman, Christopher. The Debate on the Crusades.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

Note: Readers interested in primary sources in English
translation have many options available to them. Some
sources and excerpts are available online, in particular via
the Internet Medieval Sourcebook (https://sourcebooks.
fordham.edu/sbook.asp) and De Re Militari (https://
deremilitari.org/).

There are also a number of printed primary source
collections; I have listed only a few here:

Allen, S. J., and Emilie Amt, eds. The Crusades: A Reader.
2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2014.

Bird, Jessalyn, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell, eds.
Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents
in Translation from Innocent II to the Fall of
Acre, 1187-1291. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

Eidelberg, Shlomo. The Jews and the Crusaders: The
Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

12 | THE CRUSADES

Gabrieli, Francesco, ed. Arab Historians of the Crusades.
Trans. E. J. Costello. Oxon: Routledge, 1969.
Peters, Edward, ed. The First Crusade: “The Chronicle of
Fulcher of Chartres” and Other Source Materials.
2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 1998.

There are also short histories of the crusades that
incorporate translated sources. Again, I list only a few
representative titles here:

Christie, Niall. Muslims and Crusaders. Christianity’s Wars
in the Middle East, 1095-1382, from the Islamic
Sources. Oxon: Routledge, 2014.

Rubenstein, Jay. The First Crusade: A Brief History with
Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015.

Lastly, many translated sources have been published in
their entirety as single texts via Penguin Classics or the
Crusades Texts in Translation Series (Routledge).

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Connections and
Conflicts in the
Eleventh-Century
Mediterranean

THE FIRST CRUSADE OCCURRED IN A COMPLEX AND
dynamic eastern hemisphere, and it was strongly
influenced by both longstanding trends and more recent
events. Indeed, as one would expect, it wasn’t called the
“first” of anything at the time it happened. It was only in
hindsight that the First Crusade became a beginning, and
even in hindsight, it marked a beginning only in the eyes
of some. Others at the time interpreted it as just another
instance of phenomena already well underway.

This chapter provides historical context for the rise of
the crusading movement. Our view will gradually narrow

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

14 | THE CRUSADES

as we zoom in from Afro-Eurasia to the Mediterranean to
Europe. As we'll see, the First Crusade, though impactful,
was neither inevitable nor entirely new.

The eastern hemisphere was a large and relatively mobile
place in the year 1000. Networks that allowed for the
movement of ideas, wealth, and people spanned Afro-
Eurasia. In east Asia, the prosperous, booming, and
technologically sophisticated Song Dynasty in China
was a—if not the—major engine of hemispheric growth.
Well-travelled sea routes connected east Asia, south Asia,
west Asia, and east Africa. Overland routes, meanwhile,
connected Asia from east to west. Goods, technologies,
conflicts, and cultures moved along these routes in both
directions. People moved along these routes, too, both
voluntarily and involuntarily; a demand for slave labor
also connected many parts of the hemisphere.

Centrally located on these sea and land routes,
poised between the eastern and western edges of the
hemisphere, stretched a vast region that will here be
called the Islamicate world. Although the religion of
Islam and the Arabs as a people had expanded out from
the Arabian peninsula dramatically in the seventh and
eighth centuries, the Islamicate world circa 1000 was
not unified or homogenous in terms of political powers,
ethnic identities, or religious sects. Indeed, it was not
exclusively populated by Muslims. While conversions
to Islam continued to increase over time in areas under
Islamic rule, the rulers of regions within the Islamicate

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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16 | THE CRUSADES

world governed diverse and often non-Muslim-majority
populations. These populations included members of
many different Christian and Jewish sects, who were
considered dhimmis (“protected persons”), socially
inferior and subject to specific taxation in return for
toleration and the protection of the ruler.

Despite all these variables, these regions shared
four general characteristics that allow us to view them
together as an Islamicate world. First, they shared
common philosophies of Islamic government, as well
as a common language for trade and intellectual work:
Arabic. Second, they focused on the cultivation of
prosperous and interconnected urban societies. Although
people depended on technologically-assisted agriculture
as the foundation of their economies—as everyone did
at the time—the Islamicate world was distinctly urban
in its priorities and achievements. Third, in many cases
rulers were committed to fostering artistic, intellectual,
and technological achievement, enabled by the material
wealth generated by strong economies and expressed in
the cities and courts of the elites. Lastly, many people
in these regions valued trade and travel. Even armchair
travelers avidly consumed guidebooks and maps, and
the most adventurous explorers clocked up journeys
of thousands of miles. These commonalities allow us
to identify and discuss an Islamicate world despite the
political, ethnic, and religious variation within it.

The Islamicate world played a vital role circa 1000
because it connected virtually the entirety of the eastern
hemisphere. Looking east and south from Baghdad, one
could travel far and wide: through the Red Sea and the

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CONNECTIONS & CONFLICTS IN THE 11TH CENTURY | 17

Gulf of Aden to the prosperous cities of the east African
coast and the Indian Ocean; via the Indian Ocean to the
thriving societies and markets of southeast and east Asia;
by overland routes to the cities and markets of central and
ultimately east Asia. Looking west from Baghdad, one
could range across the Sahara to the wealthy kingdoms
of west Africa or sail all around the Mediterranean,
stopping at some ports governed by Muslims and others
by Christians. The position of the Islamicate world vis-
a-vis the rest of Afro-Eurasia allowed, in theory, for
movement all the way from the prosperous kingdoms
of western Africa—or the distant reaches of the British
Isles—to Japan. The Islamicate world was thus, in a sense,
the center of the eastern hemisphere as it existed in 1000.
It was, however, a fluid and at times conflicted center, and
the eleventh century proved to be particularly dynamic
in the Mediterranean, the region with which this book is
primarily concerned.

The medieval Mediterranean inherited the multiethnic
and pluralistic legacy of the Roman Empire, as well as the
legacies of all the many different peoples who had moved
through the Roman Empire in late antiquity. (Indeed, the
movement of peoples within Afro-Eurasia has a long, long
history.) The medieval Mediterranean was thus populated
by incredibly diverse yet interconnected human beings.

In the eleventh century, Christians, Muslims, and Jews
all called communities around the Mediterranean home,
living together in some places and apart in others. At the
same time, Christian and Islamic communities had their
own sectarian divisions. In eleventh-century Islam, the
Sunni and Shi‘ite divide was not necessarily explosive,

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

18 | THE CRUSADES

and thus Sunnis and Shi‘ites—as well as other Islamic
sects—often coexisted in close proximity. Nonetheless the
divide between Sunni and Shi‘ite Islam could be a point
of contention, particularly when sectarian allegiances
aligned (or failed to align) with ethnic identity, economic
interest, or political ambition. Eleventh-century
Christianity also contained sectarian differences, perhaps
most notably between the Latin church of Rome and the
Byzantine church based at Constantinople. Additionally,
many Christian sects that were considered heretical by
both Latin and Byzantine churches continued to thrive in
areas under Islamic rule.

Clearly, conflict existed within as well as between
religions, and at times, both kinds of conflict were
influenced by different traditions of holy war. Both Latin
and Byzantine Christians had access to a clear tradition
of approved Christian violence and just war from late
antiquity forward. Justified Christian violence (including
warfare), as influentially outlined by Augustine of Hippo
in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, fulfilled three
criteria: it responded to an injury; it was performed by an
appropriate authority; and it was performed with correct
intention. That correct intention was Christian love, i.e.,
charity (caritas); this love was supposed to lead Christians
to seek the spiritual good of their adversaries (by forcibly
correcting them) and to safeguard the spiritual wellbeing
of Christendom. Meanwhile, Muslims had access to the
concept of military jihad. While jihad (literally meaning
“struggle”) could be performed in a variety of different
ways—most especially within oneself, against sin—it
could also take the form of armed endeavor against

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CONNECTIONS & CONFLICTS IN THE 11TH CENTURY | 19

enemies of Islam, i.e., military jihad. Both Christian and
Muslim traditions of holy warfare could be directed at
“internal” threats, i.e., other Christians or other Muslims.’

However, it is worth emphasizing vigorously that
holy warfare was only one (and by no means the most
regular) way that people interacted with each other in the
eleventh-century Mediterranean. Then as now, people
had choices about how they engaged with one another.
Holy war was one choice; other modes of warfare and
violence were also options; and so were coexistence,
collaboration, diplomacy, intermarriage, and trade. Holy
war was emphatically not some sort of default option
for either Christians or Muslims, and whether religious
similarities or differences sparked conflict or cooperation
depended heavily on other contextual factors. As much
of the rest of this book will show, religious accord did not
necessarily lead to alliance and religious divisions did not
necessarily lead to violence.

Moreover, religion was not the only aspect of identity
that mattered in the eleventh century. People around the
Mediterranean sought identity in ethnic and family groups
as well as in religion or sect. In a world without nation-
states in the modern sense, it was often kin identities that
were most closely linked with political and economic
activities. Familial, political, and economic relationships
were often one and the same.

7 Those seeking a very succinct and clear comparison of
Christian holy war and jihad are encouraged to consult Paul
M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the
Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 29.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

20 | THE CRUSADES

Mostimportantly, the eleventh-century Mediterranean
was not static in any way. As the next section discusses,
it was frequently, one is tempted to say incessantly,
contested and traversed by actors large and small who
shifted political alliances along or across religious or
ethnic boundaries as it suited them. Economically, in a
world where the fastest mode of travel was by sea, the
Mediterranean was a superhighway, connecting the lands
around it and providing access to further regions via the
Sahara, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and overland
routes in Asia. From a religious perspective, the holiest
cities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims were positioned
on or just beyond the Mediterranean’s eastern shore. And
in the eleventh century, in particular, the Mediterranean
witnessed the major influx and movement of several
different mobile groups, from Saljuq Turks to Scandinavian
Vikings and their descendants, the Normans. Surveying
the basic political players in the medieval Mediterranean
will allow us to better understand the complex dynamics
of the region in the eleventh century.

The political situation in the eastern Mediterranean
circa 1000 was complex and openly contested. In the
early part of the eleventh century, Sunni ‘Abbasid
caliphs remained nominally in charge in west Asia while
others wielded actual power. As a result, political cracks
spiderwebbed across the region, mitigated only in part by
shared cultural and economic interests. Then a new group
entered the Anatolian peninsula: the Ghuzz (or Oghuz)
Turks, a militarily-adept nomadic people from central
Asia who had converted to Sunni Islam and adopted
many cultural customs from the Persians. They were not

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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22 | THE CRUSADES

a centrally unified people: some groups entered Anatolia
when invited to fight for local claimants to power while
others came to fulfill their own ambitions. By the middle
of the eleventh century, ‘Abbasid caliphs in western Asia
were figureheads under the control of one Turkic family
dynasty, known as the Great Saljuqs.

Although the Great Saljuqs proclaimed that they had
ushered in a new Islamic empire, in reality west Asia in
the late eleventh century was still politically fractured. In
particular, the northeastern Mediterranean and Anatolia
formed a principality, the Sultanate of Rum, under the
control of mostly independent Saljuq leadership in the
late 1070s. Thus, over the course of the eleventh century,
west Asia had shifted hands and divided. The Anatolian
peninsula and northeastern Mediterranean, in particular,
became a frontier zone of sorts, contested by many.

The political situation in west Asia was further
destabilized in the late eleventh century. In 1092,
Malikshah, a Great Saljuq sultan who had helped stabilize
the region, died; he was predeceased by his vizier and chief
administrator. Other members of Malikshah’s household
followed suit in rapid succession. Just two years later,
in 1094, the admittedly figurehead ‘Abbasid caliph al-
Muqtadi died. Succession disputes followed all these
deaths. As a result, at the end of the eleventh century,
local rulers were thrust back on their own devices and
defenses even more than before on the frontiers of the
northeastern Mediterranean. In many cases, local rulers
disagreed with each other over which faction to support,
so were wary of their neighbors. This was the context into
which the First Crusade marched.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CONNECTIONS & CONFLICTS IN THE 11TH CENTURY | 23

Moving counterclockwise around the Mediterranean,
to the west of Anatolia was the Byzantine Empire
(Byzantium), which endured its own political and
territorial upheavals in the eleventh century. With
its capital Constantinople anchored in the northeast
corner of the Mediterranean, Byzantium represented
the continuation and evolution of what had been the
eastern Roman Empire. Indeed, the Byzantines fully
considered themselves Roman. In the words of historian
Jonathan Harris, because they saw themselves as the
living heirs of the Christian Roman Empire, they believed
that “Constantinople occupied a supreme place in the
Christian world, over and above Rome or Jerusalem.”®

In the mid-eleventh century the Byzantine Empire
was prosperous, wealthy, and powerful, poised on the
intersection of numerous trade routes and fluently
engaged with many different regional powers. It shared
some cultural characteristics with western European
polities, such as Christianity, though sectarian differences
between Latin and Byzantine Christianity made that a
cause for friction as much as common ground. Byzantium,
particularly Constantinople, also shared characteristics
with polities in the Islamicate world, such as sophisticated
urban living, a professional bureaucratic elite, and a
coin-based economy. In pursuit of its own interests,
the Byzantine Empire alternately entered into alliances
with or waged war against Christian, Muslim, and pagan
neighbors. While the empire’s main holdings centered

8 Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, 2nd ed.
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 17.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

24 | THE CRUSADES

on its capital, emperors also claimed more peripheral
lands, including a shrinking assortment of territories in
southern Italy.

But the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire were
challenged from multiple directions in the later eleventh
century. In 1071 the Byzantines found themselves pushed
out of Italy altogether by the Normans—originally
“north men” from Scandinavia who invaded and then
settled in northern France in the tenth century—and
a few short years later they faced further Norman
aggression much closer to home, in the Balkans. Only
the accession of a formidable new Byzantine dynasty in
1081, the Komnenian family led by Emperor Alexios I,
put a temporary halt to Norman advances in the Balkans.
Alexios had no time to celebrate this pause in the fighting,
however. While focused on the Norman threat, the
Byzantines had lost most of the territory they claimed in
the Anatolian peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean
to the Sultanate of Rum. Thus at the end of the eleventh
century, Byzantium continued to face threats on eastern
and western borders as well as internal rivals for the
imperial throne.

Moving to the southern Mediterranean, by 1000
the Shi‘ite Fatimid Caliphate controlled north Africa,
Sicily, and Egypt, including vital trade routes up the Red
Sea from the Indian Ocean. By the 1060s, however, the
Fatimids were concentrating on maintaining their central
territories in Egypt—all too aware of the sectarian and
military threat posed by their Sunni Saljuq neighbors—
and thus they allowed other regions to slip from their
control. In north Africa, the Fatimids were supplanted by

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crus4@P ahi 2 fasten Mediterranean, L020. 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

26 | THE CRUSADES

their former governors while in Sicily, severalindependent
dynasties came into power. Then, like the Great Saljuqs,
the Fatimids were seriously destabilized in the 1090s.
In 1094, the Fatimid caliph and his chief military leader
died, leading to internal disputes over leadership. In
summary, the political situation in the eastern half of the
Mediterranean was in flux in the late eleventh century.

At the same time the political situation in the western
half was equally complex and equally available for further
military opportunism. Since the early eighth century,
most of the Iberian peninsula had been ruled by the Sunni
Caliphate of Cordoba. This caliphate governed a multi-
religious, multi-ethnic population. A few small Christian-
ruled kingdoms were located in the mountainous north of
the peninsula. They periodically fought both each other
and the caliphate.

Then, in 1031, following on the heels of civil war, the
Caliphate of Cordoba broke into smaller independent
principalities known as ta’ifa (“party” or “faction”)
kingdoms. These ta ’ifa kingdoms maintained a dynamic
and pluralistic cultural milieu, and politically, they vied
with each other as well as with Christian-ruled kingdoms
in the north. It gradually became common practice for
ta’ifa kingdoms to deliver tribute (funds and slaves) to
the northern kingdoms in return for military assistance.
Unsurprisingly, this encouraged the northern kingdoms
to view the south as a lucrative prize.

Asthe eleventh century continued tounfold, the Iberian
peninsula witnessed continued political fragmentation
and multiple conflicts colored with religious overtones. By
the mid-eleventh century, ambitious rulers in the north of

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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28 | THE CRUSADES

the peninsula had been joined by often religiously zealous
fighters and Latin Christian clerics from what is now
France. In 1085, the centrally-located ta ‘ifa city of Toledo
was conquered by Alfonso VI, King of Léon-Castile
and Galicia. All concerned saw this as a fatal blow to
Muslim rule in the peninsula. In fact, however, Alfonso’s
conquest of Toledo simply prompted new political actors
to conquer portions of southern Iberia: the Almoravids.
The Almoravids were a highly-motivated Sunni Berber
dynasty based in North Africa. They viewed the northern
kingdoms as enemies and the ta’ifa kingdoms as weak
and morally bankrupt. (The ‘a ’ifa kings, for their part,
considered the Almoravids distinctly uncivilized, though
helpful when dealing with encroachment from the north.)
Thus, over the course of the eleventh century, the Iberian
peninsula went from being mostly unified in terms of
government and culture to being heavily fractured and
actively contested by variously-motivated armed actors.
This resembled the contemporary situation in Anatolia
and the eastern Mediterranean, as already described.
Both the territorially-ambitious rulers in north Iberia
and the Normans, who were challenging the Byzantine
Empire and various Islamicate polities at roughly the same
time, can be seen as the vanguard of an energetic Europe
in the eleventh century. Yet this was not a united Europe.
Indeed, in the eleventh century European political actors
competed with each other, and made alliances with extra-
European powers, at a fair clip. Modern nation-states
as we know them did not exist, and so major political
actors included many different—often competing—kings,
emperors, and popes, as well as dukes, princes, and

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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30 | THE CRUSADES

city-republics like Venice and Genoa. Titles, powers, and
borders alike were fluid. The Normans in particular should
be viewed as a loosely affiliated ethnic and kin group,
rather than a firmly unified people or polity. Like many
others, the Normans had their eyes on many different
pieces of the territorial pie, and, again like others, they
weren't picky about the religious identity of their allies or
opponents. For example, at roughly the same time as the
Normans attacked Islamic rulers of Sicily, they attacked
the last remaining outposts of Byzantium in Italy.

Clearly Europeans were not strangers in the
Mediterranean in the eleventh century. Although the
political collapse of the western Roman Empire in the
fifth century had reduced European engagement and role
in the Mediterranean world for a time, nonetheless trade
had resumed and continued to link western Europe and
the Mediterranean. So too did politics. Meanwhile, Latin
Christian pilgrimages by land and sea were undertaken by
many different social classes, century after century.

Having said all that, it is nonetheless clear that the
eleventh century marked a change. Whether we consider
efforts by northern kingdoms in Iberia to, in their
words, “reconquer” portions of the Iberian peninsula,
the Norman conquest of Sicily, or the First Crusade, the
eleventh century witnessed European powers engaging in
the Mediterranean world to a different degree. Virtually
all of these powers self-identified as Latin Christian and
framed their expansionary efforts with religious rhetoric.

In the broadest terms, these expansionary efforts
were made possible by the coincidence of Mediterranean
and European trends. As just described, in the late

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CONNECTIONS & CONFLICTS IN THE 11TH CENTURY | 31

eleventh-century Mediterranean there were clear
opportunities for expansion made possible by political
fragmentation, challenge, and change. At the same time,
an uptick in prosperity also enabled growth and expansion
in Europe. As we will now see, Latin Christian culture
supported this expansion via cultural trends related to the
relationship between religion, power, and violence.

The eleventh century saw the beginning of substantial
growth in European prosperity. At the most basic level,
this was enabled by a distinct climatic trend, the Medieval
Climatic Anomaly (MCA). From roughly 950 to 1250,
the MCA affected different regions of the world in
different ways: some places grew warmer, some cooler,
some wetter, some drier. To Europe, the MCA delivered
relatively warmer temperatures and greater climatic
stability. This warmer and more stable climate, combined
with various technological advances—some generated
within Europe and others acquired via the Islamicate
world—would ultimately lead to higher agricultural yields
and safer sea travel. These trends in turn drove population
growth, higher standards of living, longer life expectancy,
nascent mercantile economies, and a whole host of related
cultural developments within Europe.

This growth in prosperity was visible throughout
Europe, but most importantly for our purposes, it
revitalized northwestern Mediterranean port cities. In
the eleventh century, these Latin Christian-ruled urban
centers— Genoa, Venice, Naples, Marseilles—increasingly
tapped into preexisting trade routes crisscrossing the
Mediterranean. Like other trade ports around the
Mediterranean, they welcomed small groups from other

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

32 | THE CRUSADES

cultures, regions, and religions to settle and establish
long-term neighborhoods in their cities in order to
promote trade. Most Mediterranean cities had long been
multiethnic and multireligious, regardless of their rulers’
religion, so this was a boost to a preexisting trend, rather
than a new phenomenon.

What was rather newer was the settlement of Jews
in northwestern Europe. Alternately attracted by the
economic growth and related opportunities unfolding
in the region or deliberately recruited by authorities
keen to strategically benefit from their experience
with Mediterranean markets and trading practices,
small Jewish communities were established in what are
now France, England, and Germany in the tenth and
eleventh centuries. As Brian Catlos has so conclusively
demonstrated, Muslim communities also lived within
Latin Christendom and Europe specifically.? Thus in
the eleventh century religious diversity not only existed
around the Mediterranean coast but also within northern
Europe.

Prosperity was not the only thing trending upwards
in eleventh-century Europe. Piety, too, was increasingly
a public and popular concern. In the tenth and eleventh
centuries, Latin Christians at many different levels
of society demonstrated, and increasingly vocalized,
concerns about the state of their souls and the state of
Christendom in general. At the risk of oversimplification,

9 Brian A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom,
c. 1050-1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

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CONNECTIONS & CONFLICTS IN THE 11TH CENTURY | 33

the eleventh century, like others before it, was an age of
piety for Latin Christians—and an age of religious reform.

What needed reform and why? One family of concerns
centered on the way monasteries functioned. Monasteries
were the spiritual engine of Latin Christendom at the
time. Monks and nuns prayed for the souls of those
departed and for the well-being of Christendom. They
were the milites Christi (“soldiers of Christ”) at the front
lines of spiritual combat, fighting the good fight against
sin and the forces of evil, acquiring individual spiritual
merit, and uplifting their societies along with themselves.
Monasteries depended on the social elite—the nobility—
who founded, funded, staffed, and protected them.

The cozy relationship between the nobility and
the monasteries, as well as some frankly scandalous
misbehavior in papal Rome, led to discontent. Critics of
the church complained, no doubt sometimes with cause,
about simony (the buying and selling of church offices),
nepotism, a lack of clerical chastity, an unseemly focus
on the acquisition of material wealth, and a purported
lack of even the most basic ecclesiastical education. The
effectiveness of monastic prayers and the sacraments—
and, thus, implicitly, the fate of one’s soul—depended
upon the genuine virtue and sacred efficacy of the priests
and monks in question.

Another family of concerns focused on societal
violence. Violence in Latin Christian culture was not
new and it was not de facto “unchristian,” as already
outlined. However, the fact that Christian violence could
be justified and charitable—that at its most extreme,
Christian holy war was possible—did not mean that

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34 | THE CRUSADES

Christian violence was necessarily free from sin. Justice
alone did not necessarily make violence a moral good,
and so penance—an act that demonstrated contrition
and repaid God for sins committed—might be required
after performing just violence. Although the idea of
Christian violence was well established, beginning in the
tenth century many voiced concerns about the details of
violence within society—who was violent, when, why,
and against whom. The Latin Christian nobility, whose
social role hinged upon the performance of violence,
were implicated in these concerns.

This dual focus on piety and violence encouraged two
related socio-religious movements starting in the mid-
tenth century. First, the Peace of God movement tried
to limit who could be targeted with violence. Women,
children, the poor, and church buildings and personnel
should be off limits. Second, the Truce of God movement
tried to limit when violence could be appropriately
used; Sundays, holy days, and the like were thought
inappropriate. Both movements were enthusiastically
supported by members of the church and the lower levels
of society.

That said, the success of both movements relied upon
vows (sacred promises) taken by members of the elite
fighting classes. Furthermore, both movements were
enforced by means of punitive violence inflicted by
vow-keepers upon vow-breakers. So, the goal of these
movements was not to end violence or defang the Latin
Christian nobility, but rather to direct violence and the
elites who performed it. Additionally, the means by which
this goal was to be achieved explicitly reinforced the idea

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CONNECTIONS & CONFLICTS IN THE 11TH CENTURY | 35

of two kinds of violence: “right and good” Christian
violence (performed in the right circumstances and by
the right people) served to correct immoral, wrongful
violence (performed in the wrong circumstances or by
the wrong people).

Ultimately reformers interpreted concerns about both
ecclesiastical piety and violence as the result of undue lay
influences on the Latin church. In other words, from the
reformers’ perspective, relationships between members
of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and lay elites corrupted
monasteries and the church in general. The prevalence
of immoral, unchristian violence was likewise thought
to be caused by out-of-control lay elites. If this was the
problem, then the answer seemed clear to reformers
inside the Latin church: the church should not rely upon
the laity for wealth, power, or authority. In the eleventh
century such reformers gradually ascended the steps
of power within the Latin church and eventually took
the highest seat, that of the pope. From that vantage
point, the problem looked less about the relationship
between any given noble family and their local church
or monastery and more about the relationship between
popes and kings, and popes and emperors (i.e., Germanic
kings who had been subsequently acclaimed emperor by
the papacy).

A certain tension between popes and lay monarchs
was hardly new. Since Christendom had long been
conceived as a political, social, and cultural entity united
in a theocracy, the question of who was at the very top
of the power hierarchy was always present. Nonetheless,
relative equilibrium between popes and kings/emperors

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36 | THE CRUSADES

was disrupted dramatically by the eleventh-century
reform movement, which sought to ensure the church’s
independence from lay influence. At the very highest
level, this meant that popes should be independent and
should guide and be depended upon by secular elites.
Popes should trump emperors and kings.

Even if this was a purely theoretical claim, it’s easy to see
how it might have upset a king or an emperor. However,
the matter was not just theoretical; the issue had teeth.
In a document usually ascribed to Pope Gregory VII and
dated to 1075, the papacy claimed—as the only universal
power in the world founded by God alone—the right to
depose bishops, to absolve subjects from vows of fealty,
to be judged by no other human individual or office,
and even to depose emperors. Gregory VII made such
claims from a comfortable position, since he enjoyed the
ideological and military support of the powerful Countess
Matilda of Tuscany.

The emperor at the time, Henry IV of Germany,
immediately saw the threat encapsulated in these
claims. He was actually not unsympathetic to the goals
of the reformers. After all, his father, Henry III, had
nominated a reformer to the papacy. But Henry IV could
not tolerate the extent of these papal claims. He, like his
predecessors, relied upon the right to place clergy into
powerful positions, such as bishoprics. Bishops wielded
secular as well as spiritual power. Loyal bishops helped
counterbalance centrifugal pressures on royal and
imperial power generated by powerful German noble
families. These papal claims meant that Henry IV would
have to contend not only with restless nobles, but also with

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CONNECTIONS & CONFLICTS IN THE 11TH CENTURY | 37

a group of bishops loyal first and foremost to the pope,
whose lands were likewise under papal, not imperial,
authority. From Henry’s perspective, if he accepted
these claims, he would be unable to maintain power
without complete submission to the papacy, which he
was unwilling to make. Unsurprisingly, then, Henry IV’s
response was to issue firm counterclaims: Gregory VII
was, in Henry’s view, a false and impious individual who
should be deposed from the papal seat.

Thus began a decades-long conflict between Latin
Christian emperors and popes. Historians call this the
Investiture Conflict, because debate often focused on
the question of who should invest bishops with their
bishoprics and lands. On both sides this conflict was waged
with words, political actions (including the elevation of
alternative anti-emperors and anti-popes), and military
force. This particular conflict would not be resolved until
1122, while the larger issue of papal-imperial (or papal-
regnal) relations would surface repeatedly all through the
medieval and early modern period.

There are three reasons why this conflict matters for
the history of the crusades. First, the First Crusade was
launched in the midst of the Investiture Conflict. As
discussed more fully in the next chapter, the pope who
launched it was contending with an imperial anti-pope
who had control of the city of Rome at the time. Thus the
crusade should be read in the context of papal-imperial
politics; it was a significant move in that internecine
conflict.

Second, papal claims to military force became ever
more explicit and pervasive before and during the

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38 | THE CRUSADES

Investiture Conflict. Papal claims to legitimate use of
military force were not new, but reform popes had
deliberately stepped up and intensified these claims.
For example, in 1053 Pope Leo IX personally led armies
against Norman forces in southern Italy, in 1063 Pope
Alexander II granted a collective spiritual reward to those
who would fight against one of his enemies, and in 1074
Gregory VII called upon all Latin Christians to aid the
Byzantines by fighting against the Saljuqs. Subsequently
Gregory claimed the authority to call Christians to arms
to defend the cause of the church and himself as pope (he
considered these causes identical) against Henry IV and
his allies.

Third, the conflict—and the various claims and issues
that arose during it—affected and reflected dynamics
in the Mediterranean more broadly. The Investiture
Conflict was not only an internecine Latin Christian
affair. After all, the papacy had long been a political actor
in the Mediterranean because it ruled its own lands in
Italy. These lands were bordered variously by Byzantine
outposts, German imperial holdings in northern Italy, and
locales (like Sicily) governed at times by Islamic powers.

In the eleventh century popes sought allies among all
these various powers in order to defend or expand papal
lands. These alliances were, to say the least, flexible. Take,
for example, relations between the Normans and Leo IX.
As just noted, in 1053 Leo allied with the Byzantines
and led armies against Norman forces in southern
Italy—unsuccessfully. He was then held captive by the
Normans until he acknowledged the Norman conquests
as legitimate. Leo was thus at best a lukewarm friend to

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CONNECTIONS & CONFLICTS IN THE 11TH CENTURY | 39

the Normans. Yet much the same could be said about his
relations with the Byzantines. Although his armies fought
on their side in 1053, he also directly contributed to a
major schism between the Latin and Byzantine churches.

We see similar adroit maneuvers during the papal
reign of Gregory VII. In 1074 Gregory excommunicated
Robert Guiscard, the Norman patriarch who, despite
previous alliances with the Muslim rulers of Sicily,
spearheaded the eventual conquest of the island. In the
same year, Gregory VII called upon all Christians to aid
the Byzantines against the Saljugs. These events would
seem to place the papacy firmly with the Byzantines
and against the Normans. However, the Investiture
Conflict and the papacy’s need for armed allies to
oppose imperial forces shifted the playing field. In 1084
Gregory VII restored good relations with the Normans
when Henry IV’s armies marched on Rome. In the end,
this move backfired spectacularly on Gregory; Norman
troops did indeed retake Rome, but they promptly sacked
the city. Outraged Roman citizens forced the pope to flee
to the Norman-held city of Salerno.

The point is not that the papacy was a more pliable
or inconsistent ally than others, but rather, that the
Mediterranean in the eleventh century was fluid and
vigorous, and that Latin Christian rulers, both lay and
ecclesiastical, engaged flexibly in this environment. The
First Crusade did not occur in a static world in which
unified Christians and unified Muslims faced each other
down in a perpetual “us vs. them” struggle. Neither did it
occur in a world that believed in Christian (or any other
kind of) pacifism. It occurred, instead, in the dynamic

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40 | THE CRUSADES

and rapidly changing landscape of the eleventh-century
Mediterranean, in which Christian and Muslim rulers
alternately allied and contended with each other and
amongst themselves for political, economic, and religious
advantages. All the while the diverse peoples they ruled
pursued their own goals, as individuals or as members
of regional, religious, or cultural groups. In the more
narrowly defined landscape of Europe, Latin Christians
were increasingly concerned with piety and increasingly
sought to both restrain and deploy violence in the pressing
pursuit of salvation.

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CONNECTIONS & CONFLICTS IN THE 11TH CENTURY | 41

Further Reading

Abulafia, David. The Great Sea: A Human History of
the Mediterranean. Reprint. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013.

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The
World System A.D. 1250-1350. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991.

Blumenthal, Uta-Renate. The Investiture Controversy:
Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth
Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1991.

Catlos, Brian A. Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom
c. 1050-1614. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014.

Davis-Secord, Sarah. Where Three Worlds Met: Sicily in the
Early Medieval Mediterranean. Ithaca NY: Cornell
University Press, 2017.

Koch, Bettina. Patterns Legitimizing Political Violence:
Islamic and Christian Traditions and Legacies.
Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016.

Lamb, Hubert H. Climate, History, and the Modern World.
2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Lapidus, Ira M. A History of Islamic Societies. 2nd ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Malegam, Jehangir Yezdi. The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing
Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000-1200.
Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Sizgorich, Thomas. Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity:
Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam.

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Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

42 | THE CRUSADES

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008.

Tellenbach, Gerd. The Church in Western Europe from the
Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Treadgold, Warren. A History of Byzantine State and
Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

II
Constructing the First
Crusade: Contexts,

Events, and Reactions

AS THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER MADE CLEAR, THE FIRST
Crusade did not spring fully formed into an otherwise
static world. It was informed by ongoing trends and
opportunities, including political fragmentation in
the eastern Mediterranean, European prosperity, and
cultural trends and political disputes within Latin
Christendom. Yet at the same time, the First Crusade was
not inevitable. After all, when Pope Urban II preached
what would become the First Crusade in 1095, he knew
that Gregory VII had also urged Latin Christians to aid
the Byzantines against the Saljuqs—and he knew that
Gregory’s urgings had fallen flat.

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44 | THE CRUSADES

As this chapter demonstrates, the First Crusade
conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 occurred in and affected
a complex Mediterranean world. Furthermore the
meanings ascribed to the events of the crusade were
several right from the beginning. Writers in Latin
Christendom, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamicate
world sought to explain what had happened in different
ways. By the middle of the twelfth century, the crusading
movement was actively evolving and popular in Latin
Christendom. However, the crusade of 1147-49 would
demonstrate that the Mediterranean continued to be
complex and dynamic; crusade planning and popularity
were no substitute for full knowledge of the political
landscape.

Narratives of the crusades sometimes imagine Urban II
travelling triumphantly on the 1095 preaching tour that
inspired the First Crusade. The reality was a little less
heroic. You'll remember that Gregory VII’s papacy ended
in shambles in 1085, with the pope excluded from the
city of Rome. Gregory’s successor, Pope Victor III, who
literally tried to run away when informed of his election to
the papal see, lasted only a year in office due to ill health. In
the meantime, Norman forces continued to fight imperial
armies, who in turn rallied around their own proclaimed
pope who held Rome until a crusading army delivered it to
Urban in 1097. Thus Urban was in fact largely unwelcome
in the city of Rome in 1095; he did not launch the First
Crusade from a position of unimpeachable papal power.

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 45

Indeed, as already emphasized, one context in which
to view the First Crusade is that of the papal-imperial
contest for ultimate authority within Latin Christendom.
Urban’s 1095 preaching tour through what is now northern
Italy and France was a proactive response to a relatively
precarious position. Like any political campaign, Urban’s
tour served to build and reaffirm relationships with a
variety of local powers, both ecclesiastical and lay. It
furthermore allowed him to continue advancing reform
goals through local and regional church councils, and,
especially, to advertise to French bishops a substantial
council to be held at Clermont in November 1095. Last
but not least, this was the first such tour undertaken by
a pope, and so many people at all levels of society had
the novel experience of actually seeing a pope in their
midst, with the full and deliberate theatricality of Urban’s
entourage. In this context, Urban’s appeal for an armed
expedition to the eastern Mediterranean—a call that was
deliberately pitched at the Frankish nobility and knights,
rather than royal or imperial powers—was a reaffirmation
of the papacy’s moral supremacy and right to direct and
sanctify warfare. It was furthermore a reassertion of
Urban’s personal status as pope. Given that Urban’s appeal
was successful, it was also a vivid demonstration of the
papacy’s ability to inspire warfare, even if some of the
events that followed were not necessarily as Urban might
have wished.

A second context for understanding the First Crusade
is that of Byzantine domestic and foreign relations on the
one hand and Norman ambitions on the other. Urban II
did not come up with the idea for an armed campaign

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46 | THE CRUSADES

against the Saljuqs by himself. As we’ve seen, the idea was
first floated by Gregory VII in response to the Byzantine
Empire’s ongoing battle against Saljuq forces in Anatolia.
The Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos had directly
appealed for military aid as he worked unceasingly
to manage the Normans on his western frontier, the
Saljugs to the east, and political machinations at home
in Constantinople. By the late eleventh century, many
Norman contingents and other fighting forces from
Europe had fought as mercenaries or auxiliaries under
Byzantine direction in the eastern Mediterranean. As far
as we can determine, in the 1090s Alexios’s hope was for
a similar kind of armed assistance in regaining lands lost
to the Saljugqs.

Thus Alexios was not necessarily a passive actor—
as has been assumed in the past—nor was he a hapless
figure begging for assistance from a more powerful Latin
Christendom. His role in launching the First Crusade
was most likely deliberate and considered, even if—as for
Urban II—subsequent events did not play out as he had
envisioned.'° In Alexios’s case, he surely did not want the
same Normans he had just fought in the Balkans to wind
up possessing territory in his backyard, and yet they did,
as we shall see. For the Normans themselves, many of

10 Historians continue to debate the precise role played by
Alexios in the launch of the First Crusade. For a recent
summary of the debate, see Jonathan Harris, “Byzantium
and the First Crusade: Three Avenues of Approach,”
Estudios bizantinos 2 (2014): 125-41. DOI: 10.1344/
EBizantinos2014.2.5.

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 47

them the same families and individuals who had defeated
Islamicate and Byzantine forces in southern Italy, the
First Crusade offered another outlet for their territorial
ambitions and another way to build upon and benefit
from their relationship with the papacy.

Neither context, however, fully explains why Urban II’s
appeal actually resulted in action. Again, Gregory VI had
made a very similar appeal in 1074, yet did not receive the
same response. Why did Latin Christians rally to Urban’s
call for an armed expedition to the eastern Mediterranean?
The answer rests in two factors: first, the persuasive
combination of ideas brought together and intensified by
Urban, and second, the audience to which he appealed.

Like virtually all historical sources, our sources for
the ideas Urban used are imperfect. We do not have the
text of his sermon exactly as it was delivered; instead, we
have later versions and representations of it in medieval
chronicles. Of these chronicles, only a few were written
by eyewitnesses and all were written after the 1099
conquest of Jerusalem by the crusaders. In addition to
these chronicles, we have papal letters and conciliar
documents. Arguably all of these sources were affected,
to some degree, by the knowledge that the First Crusade
ultimately succeeded. Many of the chronicles in particular
bear the clear marks of authors with a particular ax or
two to grind; none of our surviving accounts of Urban’s
address were written by pro-imperial authors.

Taken together, these sources reveal a few repeating
themes and motifs that seem to have been present in 1095.
First, Urban clearly tapped into the preexisting practice
of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Pilgrimages large and small

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48 | THE CRUSADES

had been a part of Christian devotional practices for
centuries. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem was, in many ways,
the pilgrimage to end all pilgrimages, both because
of Jerusalem’s status in the Latin Christian worldview
and because of the hardships involved in travelling to
Jerusalem from Europe. We see a surge in pilgrimages to
Jerusalem in the lead up to the year 1000, in part due to
apocalyptic expectations. On the whole, Islamic rulers
viewed Christian pilgrims—whether Latin, Byzantine,
or other—as a source of revenue, and did not stop
them from journeying to Jerusalem. While the number
of Latin Christian pilgrimages dropped after damage
done to Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher in 1009 by order
of the eccentric Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, throughout
the eleventh century the numbers of Latin pilgrims to
Jerusalem gradually but fairly steadily increased again.
Thus in one sense, the First Crusade was just another,
albeit large, armed, and aggressive, group of pilgrims
trundling towards Jerusalem.

This particular pilgrimage—the First Crusade—
needed to be armed because, Urban claimed, “liberation”
was necessary: the liberation of the church and oppressed
Christians and the liberation of the holy land. This theme
of Christian liberation was not new, to say the least. Most
recently it had been used, repeatedly, by the eleventh-
century reformers who were discussed in the previous
chapter. The Peace of God Movement, the Truce of
God Movement, and the full-fledged reform movement
embodied by popes like Leo IX and Gregory VII all made
use of the rhetoric of liberation. This liberation was to be
achieved by force; remember that the Peace and Truce of

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 49

God were enforced through violence, and reform popes
had legitimated the use of force against imperial and anti-
reform individuals. So, in many ways Latin Christendom
was well primed to harken to the call to liberate the
church by means of violence.

Given all this, nonetheless, taking part in an armed
expedition thousands of miles away was obviously a risky
undertaking for many different reasons. One was likely
to suffer or die on the way and one’s family and property
would be at risk. Why would anyone commit to do this?
The post-1099 narrative accounts of Urban’s sermon
present us with a veritable buffet of reasons, but there
is one reason that shines through most clearly in those
accounts and in papal letters and conciliar documents:
because this was an opportunity to move closer to eternal
salvation; because this warfare would be penitential and
divinely directed, and thus spiritually beneficial.

These ideas were not entirely brand new. Once again,
the ideological roots lay in the papal-imperial conflict.
Earlier in the eleventh century, a group of thinkers
supported by Matilda of Tuscany provided justification
for Gregory’s assertions that fighting in a just cause could
constitute penance because of the danger and hardship
involved. Centuries before then, other popes had made
claims about the spiritual benefits to be had by fighting on
behalf of the Latin Christian church.

But although the development of penitential violence
and penitential warfare can be seen well before 1095,
the combination of the ideas and practices of penitential
warfare, Christian liberation, and Jerusalem pilgrimage
was unusually heady. The spiritual benefits on offer for

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50 | THE CRUSADES

the First Crusade were, arguably, unprecedented—or
at least, unprecedentedly appealing to their audience. It
had become possible to envision and perform violence
that was not only justified and charitable, but a positive
moral good in the eyes of the pope himself. It had become
possible to engage in a violent enterprise that, instead of
requiring even the smallest amount of penance, was itself
spiritually cleansing, i.e., penitential. The virtual violence
engaged in for centuries in the spiritual war against evil
by Christian monastics, the original milites Christi, was
now joined by physical violence performed by the laity,
the new milites Christi.

Crucially, these ideas were delivered to a highly
receptive audience. Indeed, “highly receptive audience”
may beanunderstatement. The earliest surviving narrative
account ofthe First Crusade, the Gesta Francorum (“Deeds
of the Franks”), actually describes a popular religious
movement sweeping Frankish lands first, and the papacy
cashing in on it /ater. As outlined in the previous chapter,
Latin Christians were already concerned about salvation
and about violence. They were already actively trying to
find a way for the fighting nobility to live as Christians
and already employing Christian violence in pursuit of
that goal. The First Crusade offered this audience a way
to move decisively towards salvation while continuing to
perform the acts of violence they were socialized to do.

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that the
crusaders were nothing but neat ranks of noble men and
their armed households. The papacy sought to recruit
trained armed men and exclude others, but—and not for
the last time—the papacy was unable to fully control the

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 51

expedition once launched. Virtually all elements of Latin
Christian society were mobilized—men and women,
young and old, the powerful and the poor, lay people and
churchmen, those who regularly fought and those who
had never done so. Mind you, the breadth of backgrounds
among crusaders should not be taken to mean that
in quantitative terms most people in Europe went on
crusade; the vast majority of Latin Christians declined
the very real dangers and expenses of the expedition.
Nonetheless, the challenge of handling large groups of
people with widely varying degrees of experience and
resources had become and would remain central in the
crusading movement.

Urban’s preaching was amplified by other preachers
around Europe in the weeks and months that followed
his sermon at Clermont. The news furthermore spread
by word of mouth, particularly within families and
social networks; both men and women influenced their
loved ones and associates to crusade. Those intending to
participate took vows and placed crosses on their outer
garments. As a result, the first crusaders were on the
move in 1096, though the First Crusade was not a once
and done movement. In fact, it can be divided into at
least three successive waves of movement, all of which
took the land route to Jerusalem via Constantinople. The
first, impetuous wave departed in spring 1096, the second
wave headed off in August 1096, per papal directions, and
the third wave got underway in 1099, inspired by news
of the conquest of Jerusalem. Even after 1100, individual
crusaders and small groups would continue to grab arms
and go east on a more ad hoc basis.

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52 | THE CRUSADES

The people and events of the second wave became
embedded in medieval and modern memory as “the
first” crusade. Yet the second wave itself comprised
many different households, families, and individuals, and
second wave contingents moved independently of each
other. There was no single military leader of the second
wave or of the crusade as a whole. Instead, a number
of powerful nobles provided collective leadership,
alternately cooperating and competing with each other.
Both the cooperation and the competition were surely
boosted by the fact that a number of these nobles were
linked by familial as well as political relationships. Despite
the tensions generated by these relationships, the second
wave of the First Crusade was, from the Latin Christian
perspective, successful, and because the First Crusade
quickly became and continues to serve as a prototype
expedition in popular memory, it is worth reviewing its
key events.

The Latins’ fight against perceived enemies of
Christendom began while they were still in Europe
and their first casualties were European Jews—first in
France, just after the Council of Clermont, and then in
the Rhineland, in what is now Germany, as crusaders got
underway in May 1096. In community after community,
Jewish people were alternately killed, offered the chance
to convert, or forcibly baptized. Their material assets
were seized, and many chose to kill themselves and their
loved ones rather than convert.

Assessing the forces behind the massacres of 1096 is
complicated, but it seems indisputable that for some there

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54 | THE CRUSADES

were clear economic incentives for the massacres, while
at the same time, others concluded it made no sense to
march a long distance to fight “enemies of Christ” when
there were said enemies much closer to home. For some
Latin Christians, the difference between Muslims and
Jews was not of the greatest importance; a similar attitude
had led to anti-Jewish violence in Europe after damage
done to Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher in 1009. For other
Latin Christians, the evidence suggests, Jews might even
be more deserving of violence than Muslims, since they
were considered responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.

The 1096 massacres do not constitute the first anti-
Jewish violence within Europe, but they signal the
beginning of repeated and escalating violence against
Jewish people and communities through the twelfth
century and beyond. They also remind us that crusading
violence was not—arguably could not be—fully controlled
by any one authority, not even in 1096. The papacy and
many lay authorities explicitly condemned anti-Jewish
violence before and after 1096, yet such violence would
continue, and would continue to be associated with
crusading.

At Constantinople in late 1096, the second wave hit
a sticking point. Alexios I was by no means thrilled to
have massive groups of both armed and impoverished
individuals—including many of his previous Norman
adversaries in the Balkans—knocking up against his city
walls. The Latins had maintained themselves on the trip to
Constantinople through pillaging (the common practice
at the time) and their claims to “be there to help” were
heard with a certain amount of skepticism. The fact that

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 55

Alexios’s rule was disputed by various Byzantine factions
made the situation even riskier for him.

From his perspective, Alexios managed the situation
using traditional Byzantine diplomatic strategies. First he
isolated the various leaders of the second wave. Then, in
return for gifts and funds—which served to buy supplies
from Byzantine markets and demonstrate the incredible
wealth of the empire—Alexios asked each leader for two
oaths made according to their own customs. First, the
Latins were to return to the Byzantine Empire any lands
they captured that had once belonged to it, and second,
they were to swear homage and fealty to Alexios. The
Latin leaders were unhappy with this request but their
options were limited, and ultimately almost all grudgingly
swore the oaths in order to move forward. Whether they
or Alexios would keep their oaths would remain to be
seen.

Across the Bosporus and marching towards Nicaea,
the second wave experienced two rude awakenings.
First, they kept tripping over the bones of the first wave,
whose most successful groups had barely made it farther
than Nicaea before disintegrating under the pressure of
incompetence, foolhardiness, and highly effective Saljuq
assaults. Second, the crusaders found that they were
unable to take the city of Nicaea by themselves. Nicaea,
the strongly fortified seat of the Saljuq Sultan of Rum,
Qilij Arslan, ultimately surrendered after negotiation
to Alexios and the Byzantines. The Latins woke up on
the day they intended to assault Nicaea to find imperial
flags flying and themselves barred from entering the city.

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56 | THE CRUSADES

Depending on one’s perspective, this may have looked
like teamwork or treachery.

You may wonder why Nicaea surrendered at all, since
it was so strongly fortified. The reason for the surrender
of Nicaea—and ultimately one of the most convincing
reasons for the Latin Christian conquest of Jerusalem—
rests in the complex and unstable political situation in
Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean in the 1090s, as
outlined in Chapter 1. Due to this instability, which put
immense pressure on local leaders in the region, Qilij
Arslan, the Sultan of Rum, was away from Nicaea with
his armies when the Latins showed up. The Latins and
Byzantines benefitted from a regional political situation
they had not created nor, at least in the case of the Latins,
anticipated.

Despite these setbacks in morale at Nicaea, most
but not all participants in the second wave marched to
Antioch more or less directly after Nicaea. Two of the
second wave’s leaders, Tancred and Baldwin of Boulogne,
broke away and independently moved through the region,
alternately pillaging and making alliances as seemed most
advantageous. After all, Anatolia was majority Christian,
and some local leaders who were Christians saw the Latin
presence as an opportunity to advance their own causes.
Most notably, Baldwin of Boulogne managed to establish
the first Latin principality in the eastern Mediterranean,
centered on the city of Edessa. For the rest of the second
wave, the journey from Nicaea to Antioch lasted for
approximately four tortuous months. The main problem
was not starvation—yet—but rather the toll that the heat
took on horses and pack animals. By the time the main

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 57

group reached Antioch, many knights were horseless.
This inconvenienced, incapacitated, and dishonored
those accustomed to fighting on horseback.

All present in the eastern Mediterranean recognized
the city of Antioch’s religious, economic, and political
importance. Thus despite the political fragility of the
Islamicate world at that moment, a coalition of forces
rallied to march to Antioch and oppose the Latins there.
They rightly foresaw that events at Antioch itself would
prove pivotal for the second wave. The Latins carried
on a seven-and-a-half-month siege of the city through
the winter, in a region quickly stripped of food, which
was excruciating on both sides of the city walls. Latin
leaders disagreed about how to take the city. In the end,
Bohemond of Taranto convinced his peers to promise
to give him the city if Alexios I didn’t come claim it and
Bohemond’s troops were first over the walls. When all
had agreed, Bohemond then revealed that he had already
convinced a citizen of Antioch to betray the city.

Yet all too quickly, the Latins were themselves
besieged in Antioch by Kerbogha, the governor of Mosul
and leader of the aforesaid Islamicate coalition. The city’s
resources had already been fully depleted and the Latins
faced starvation and despair. In this impossible position,
some deserted, most famously Count Stephen of Blois.
The Byzantines did not send aid, in part because Alexios
heard from Stephen on his flight westward. Based on what
Stephen reported, Alexios considered Antioch effectively
lost and moved his armies back towards Constantinople.
This seemed like wise prudence to the Byzantines and
bald faithlessness to most of the Latins. Meanwhile, in

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58 | THE CRUSADES

the city, Latin leaders disagreed about what to do. Soon,
they also disagreed about whether the Holy Lance—the
lance purportedly used to strike Jesus’s side while on
the cross—had actually been miraculously found thanks
to divine visions, or whether its revelation was a deceit
designed to tip popular opinion towards one Latin leader
or another.

Facing death by starvation, the outnumbered Latins
marched out to meet Kerbogha and were, surprisingly,
victorious. Many later claimed divine and saintly assistance
on the battlefield, though historians readily point to the
fragile unity of the coalition forces opposing the Latins,
a unity that clearly could not withstand pitched battle. As
it turned out, members of the Islamicate coalition were
not the only ones struggling with fragile unity. After the
Battle of Antioch, the Latin leaders of the second wave
fractured more decisively; relations with Alexios and
disagreements about when to move to Jerusalem affected
the fault lines. Lacking full consensus, Latin forces spread
out and took a city here and a city there. Fear of the Latins
had by now become widespread, and sources tell us of
savage practices of war, including cannibalism. Faced
with these reports and knowing they had only their own
resources to rely upon, many local rulers, Muslim and
Christian alike, offered tribute to the Latins if they would
only remain at a distance.

This situation was unlikely to prompt the second wave
to quickly move on and lose more tribute. However, not
everyone was primarily concerned with acquisition.
Ultimately the lower social classes forced the question of
when to proceed to Jerusalem in fulfillment of their vows.

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 59

Most of the second wave moved to take Jerusalem in
early spring 1099, though some did not accompany them,
notably Bohemond, now Prince of Antioch, and Baldwin,
now Count of Edessa. At that point in time, Jerusalem had
changed hands three times in the last 30 years alone: the
city was occupied violently by an ambitious Turkoman in
the 1070s; claimed by the Saljugs and given to a Saljug
amir (“commander”) in 1079; and violently taken by the
Fatimids in 1098, less than a year before the crusader
armies arrived. One can only imagine the gloom felt
by the city’s inhabitants at the sight of yet more army
encampments.

The Latin siege of Jerusalem began in early June 1099.
The Latins knew that Fatimid armies were on the way and
moved quickly: on July 15 the siege ended in conquest
of the city and massacre of many of its inhabitants, who
were Muslims, Jews, and Christians. While it is difficult
to get an exact picture of the violence and death, in part
because Latin sources positively exulted in the bloodshed
while Arabic sources differed in their treatment of the
event, it seems clear that nonetheless many died. Though
Jerusalem was the stated goal of the crusade, the Battle of
Jerusalem was not the final major armed conflict engaged
in by the second wave; that was the Battle of Ascalon in
early August 1099. Despite the grandiose claims of Latin
Christian chronicles of the First Crusade, most historians
agree that the primary and decisive factor that enabled
the Latin conquest of Jerusalem was political turmoil in
the Islamicate eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia in the
1090s.

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Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

60 | THE CRUSADES

In the aftermath of the Latin conquest of Jerusalem,
communities around the Mediterranean struggled to
adjust to a new political reality. Godfrey of Bouillon
had been chosen to rule a new Latin Kingdom of
Jerusalem, one of four Latin-ruled polities in the eastern
Mediterranean that were conquered and created in the
early twelfth century. In the aggregate, historians often
refer to these polities as the “crusader states.” Clearly,
the political map had shifted for all Mediterranean actors
and specific relationships would have to be felt out and
established. As we will see, alliances would not be clear-
cut, fixed, or made predictably along religious fault lines.
Furthermore, internal politics within the crusader states
and between them and the rest of Latin Christendom also
had to be sorted out, not least in terms of the ongoing
papal-imperial conflict. For whom, exactly, was the
conquest of Jerusalem a victory?

Yet another part of this adjustment was to ponder the
new reality and provide an explanation for it. What had
just happened and why? As ever, the answers depended
upon whom one asked, though it is worth noting that
all perspectives agreed on one thing: the material world
reflected divine will. Thus, to a greater or lesser extent,
and with different implications, all parties considered the
Latin conquests to be an expression of God’s will.

Forthe most part, Islamic historians and commentators
did not view the Latin expedition in the eastern
Mediterranean as “new” or the “first” of anything. Many in
the late eleventh century simply expressed confusion and
alarm about what had happened. Those who did attempt
to explain events placed them firmly within the context

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62 | THE CRUSADES

of eleventh-century Latin expansion in Iberia and Sicily.
In the late eleventh century, only a minority interpreted
the crusaders as religiously motivated, though that would
change in the twelfth century, as we'll see.

Jewish writers around the Mediterranean also
placed the crusade into a previously-established and
longstanding history: that of Jewish martyrdom. As
before in Jewish history, God was testing the Jewish
people’s faith and punishing their sins. The Latins were
thus divine instruments and the cause of their actions was
divine will. Within Europe, Jewish accounts—written
in Hebrew for Jewish audiences—sought to explicitly
commemorate the active martyrdom of Jewish people
in the Rhineland. These accounts ascribe a variety of
motivations to the Latins, ranging from a desire for
righteous vengeance to simple greed, but explaining the
crusaders was not a priority; rather, these texts sought to
commemorate and celebrate those who had died. More
fragmentary sources from Jewish people in the eastern
Mediterranean who were wealthy enough to flee the
crusade describe disrupted families as well as material
want and the challenges of captivity.

Byzantine historians, most notably Alexios’s daughter,
Anna Komnene, who wrote in the mid-twelfth century,
positioned the events of 1096-99 within Byzantine
imperial history. She too, if only by the way she organized
her account, connected the expedition to earlier Norman-
Byzantine conflicts in the Balkans. Furthermore, from
her perspective, things weren’t “done” or “over”; related
events were still unspooling for Byzantium. Post-1099
Bohemond and the Byzantines (aided by the Venetians)

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 63

were actively at war with each other until Bohemond
finally submitted to Alexios in 1108. Even after that,
the Byzantines had to deal with their new neighbors,
the crusader states. In her account of events, Anna
Komnene marveled at the Latins, at times admiring
their military skill, ferocity, and religious commitment,
while at other moments denigrating what she considered
unsophisticated religious zealotry, Germanic barbarity,
and unseemly ambition. She distinguished among the
leaders of the second wave, clearly (and correctly)
representing Normans such as Bohemond as a threat to
the empire.

In the early to mid-twelfth century, Latin Christian
enthusiasts quickly and deliberately established the
First Crusade—referred to as a “journey,” “pilgrimage,”
“expedition,” or “business of Christ”—as a new cultural
benchmark within the history of (Latin) Christendom.
Ecclesiastical authors produced a flurry of accounts
commemorating the events of 1096-99. These texts did
not simply record events. In many ways they created
them, by placing them in a framework of interpretation
that would prove remarkably durable through the
centuries that followed. These accounts suggested a range
of precedents for the events of 1096-99. These precedents
were primarily biblical, but others fell into categories
we today would consider historical or mythological:
the exploits of classical heroes; the Maccabees; the
destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and Vespasian in 70 CE;
Charlemagne’s conquests in the seventh and eighth
centuries. Nonetheless, it was stressed repeatedly, the
events of 1096-99 were in some way unprecedented

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64 | THE CRUSADES

and the first of a new kind. Clearly, this historical
interpretation has remained influential and dominant for
many centuries.

These Latin Christian narratives made use of Urban’s
themes of liberation, pilgrimage, and penitential violence,
but added (we suspect) further and varied nuances. The
call for liberation was graphically justified with reports
of atrocities. Purported outrages had been committed
against fellow Christians—“brothers and sisters” in
Christ. The holy land, God’s land, the land where Christ
suffered, “mother Jerusalem” herself, had been reportedly
desecrated by “enemies of Christ.” It was thus presented
as imperative that Christians answer Urban’s call for four
broad reasons. First, because horrible injuries required
Christian vengeance. After all, one had duties as a fighting
people who desired to polish up family reputations and
not let down the ancestors, and passages from the New
Testament supported the righteous vengeance of the
godly; some accounts explicitly called out the Franks as a
noble people chosen by God, like the Israelites. Second,
because crusading was represented in some ways as an act
of imitatio Christi (“the imitation of Christ”). Crusaders
were described carrying their crosses and walking in the
footsteps of Christ; they were also described as victorious
like Christ. Third, because this might well be the end of
days. And with that in mind, fourth—most importantly—
because by doing so, one could atone for one’s sins (they
were numerous), advance towards eternal salvation, and
avoid the wrath of a disappointed and justly angered
God. In other words, on top of the themes believed to
have been present in 1095, Latin Christian writers laid

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 65

down additional and sympathetic layers of language,
symbolism, and meaning in the early twelfth century.

But even within Latin Christendom the meaning of
the First Crusade wasn’t singular, nor was it created by
the Latin church alone. Noble families and individuals in
Europe also quickly sought to memorialize the crusading
deeds of themselves and their kin on their own terms.
Whether in the architecture and decoration of churches
and monasteries that they supported, the material
goods that they bought, or the family histories that they
commissioned, lay men and women built crusading
into Latin Christian culture. It even permeated popular
culture; composers seized upon the dramatic events
of the First Crusade to craft and perform lyric and epic
poetry that celebrated Latin Christian triumph. In all
these cultural phenomena, we can discern both echoes of
form and content that had come before and a sense that
something newly substantial had just occurred.

One such “old and new” cultural phenomenon was the
concept of a military order. Military orders combined the
moral imperatives of other religious orders (like chastity
and obedience) with a moral imperative to commit acts
of physical violence on behalf of God and the church.
The earliest military orders formed in the Kingdom of
Jerusalem in the early twelfth century. The order of the
Knights of the Temple (or Templars) was founded in
Jerusalem in the years after 1099, while the already-
established Hospital of St. John (or Hospitallers), added
a military role to its original mission as a hospital starting
in the 1120s. Both orders—and the idea of military orders
in general—were popular, and religious houses for these

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66 | THE CRUSADES

orders and others were founded in Europe, too. As
subsequent chapters will discuss, military orders would
have a major impact on crusading history in the centuries
to come.

It is hopefully quite clear that crusading did not
simply stop after the 1099 Latin conquest of Jerusalem.
How could it, given this fertile cultural environment
in Latin Christendom, the needs and evolution of the
crusader states, and the active responses forming within
the Islamicate and Byzantine spheres? The landscape of
crusading history is not one of discrete military endeavors
standing out in an otherwise uneventful timeline, like
single towers scattered sparsely across a vast plain.
Instead, crusading history looks more like a forest, with
the largest and best remembered expeditions standing
tall but surrounded on all sides by other trees of different
heights—not to mention bushes and undergrowth.

Thus in the first half of the twelfth century, we see
smaller sallies aimed at various Mediterranean targets,
including, in 1135, against enemies of the papacy in
southern Italy. Sometimes these crusades were purely the
result of papal initiative, while often they reflected the
initiative of others supported by the papacy; for example,
Queens Teresa of Portugal and Urraca of Leén and Castile
continued to wage wars against Muslim opponents that
were “declared to be equivalent to crusades” by Pope
Paschal II.'' We also see small groups and individuals

11 HelenJ. Nicholson, “Women’s Involvement in the Crusades,”
in The Crusader World, ed. Adrian J. Boas (London and New
York: Routledge, 2016), 54.

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 67

simply taking off to fight “enemies of Christ,” apparently
believing themselves part of a larger and ongoing
endeavor. At the same time, unarmed pilgrimage to
Jerusalem also continued.

Understanding the growth of crusading within Latin
Christendom—in a plurality of forms—is necessary to
understand the expedition of 1147-49 (called the Second
Crusade by nineteenth-century European historians). The
traditional and oversimplified explanation for this major
multinational expedition is that a zealous Islamic ruler
(Zangi) conquered the city of Edessa in 1144, prompting
a panicked and equally zealous Latin Christian response.
This traditional explanation falls down when events
are set into a broader context, and even more when we
consider that the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem had been
asking for more military aid from Europe—either ad hoc
or additional major expeditions—all through the early
twelfth century, with only limited success.

Why, then, did Zangi’s conquest of Edessa spark
another massive expedition? To a limited degree, it
did signal a revitalized and reunified Islamic presence
in the eastern Mediterranean, one that had effectively
harnessed the rhetoric of military jihad and that posed
a greater threat to the crusader states; these dynamics
are discussed in greater depth in the following chapter.
It’s unclear, however, that Latin Christians in Europe
recognized this. Thus we have to look to two other factors
to explain why the crusade of 1147-49 was successful in
rallying support in Europe. First, the city of Edessa was of
symbolic importance, since it had been the first crusader
state established. Second, and more importantly,

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68 | THE CRUSADES

crusading ideas and culture had been growing within
Latin Christendom, and by 1144, major actors—both
royal and papal—were primed to respond.

In the 1140s the Latin church was well positioned,
both ideologically and in terms of its leaders, to grab hold
of the idea of a substantial crusade and not let go. The
pope in 1144, Eugenius II, was directly and substantially
influenced by the man who would become most directly
associated with the crusade: Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux
(d. 1153), a passionate reformer and Eugenius’s former
teacher and ongoing mentor. To say that Bernard
engineered the crusade is only a slight overstatement.
As the leading light in the Latin church at the time, he
wrote the major crusading letters, managed the preaching
of the crusade, and was its most charismatic and forceful
advocate. He expressed the central appeal of crusading
with incredible persuasion. For him, this was, as before,
a chance for redemption by violently defending and
liberating God’s land and God’s people and defeating
God’s enemies. It was furthermore an opportunity for
those currently alive to live up to the standards set by
their ancestors who participated in the First Crusade.

As always, any set of ideas needs a receptive audience.
The two most powerful monarchs in Europe in the early
1140s—King Louis VI of the Franks and King Conrad III
of Germany—both responded powerfully and actively
to the idea of a crusade. However, their courts were
markedly less enthusiastic. Bernard’s powerful preaching
made a difference there, swinging both courts to the idea
of crusade.

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CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 69

Historians identify both similarities and differences
between the events of 1096-99 and 1147-49. Both
crusades shared many ideological themes, the breadth
of people who responded to appeals for crusade and
participated on crusade, and crusade-related anti-Jewish
violence within western Europe. Yet differences can also
be identified. First, the crusade of 1147-49 encompassed
three different “fronts”: the eastern Mediterranean,
Iberia, and northern Europe. In the Iberian peninsula,
King Alfonso VII of Galicia, Leon, and Castile followed
his mother Urraca’s lead and petitioned (successfully) for
fighting in Iberia to be considered part of the crusade and
entitled to the same spiritual and legal considerations.
Meanwhile, German warriors had asked to be able to
fight pagans in the Baltic region instead of Muslims in the
Mediterranean. Both requests were approved by Bernard
of Clairvaux. Second, the presence and involvement of
major royal courts marked a change. The First Crusade had
been led by loose coalitions of nobles, but all subsequent
large-scale crusades to the eastern Mediterranean would
be led by monarchs. Third, the crusade of 1147-49 set
the precedent of using the military orders to provide
leadership and tactical expertise when royal or noble
leadership was insufficient.

The fourth and final significant difference concerns
outcome. In military terms and from the Latin perspective,
the efforts of 1147-49 were a colossal failure by virtually
any set of standards one chooses to apply. Although
royal, papal, and noble leaders had proactively tried to
resolve and prevent the logistical and organizational
problems that had plagued the First Crusade, in the

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70 | THE CRUSADES

end, their actions were insufficient. It surely didn’t help
that in a moment of dramatic historical irony, no one
in Europe bothered to consult with the leaders of the
Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem as they made plans. Both
the Frankish and German armies opted to take the land
route through Constantinople to Anatolia and both
arrived in the eastern Mediterranean severely depleted
and demoralized. Subsequently a large armed force led by
the Franks, the Germans, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem
attempted and failed to take the city of Damascus. In the
end, the only component of the crusade that could in
any way be deemed a success from the Latin Christian
perspective was the 1147 conquest of Lisbon in Iberia. All
Bernard’s dreams ended not with a bang but a whimper.
To fully understand why, we need to take a step back and
look at developments in the Mediterranean as a whole in
the twelfth century.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CONSTRUCTING THE FIRST CRUSADE | 71

Further Reading

Bull, Marcus, and Damien Kempf, eds. Writing the
Early Crusades. Text, Transmission and Memory.
Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014.

Chazan, Robert. God, Humanity, and History. The Hebrew
First Crusade Narratives. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000.

Cobb, Paul M. The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History
of the Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014.

Harris, Jonathan. Byzantium and the Crusades. 2nd ed.
London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Hodgson, Natasha. Women, Crusading and the Holy Land
in Historical Narrative. Woodbridge: Boydell &
Brewer, 2007.

Nicholson, Helen. The Knights Hospitaller. Woodbridge:
Boydell & Brewer, 2001.

Nicholson, Helen. The Knights Templar: A New History.
Stroud: The History Press, 2001.

Phillips, Jonathan. The Second Crusade: Extending the
Frontiers of Christendom. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2010.

Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The First Crusade and the Idea of
Crusading. With a new introduction. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The First Crusaders, 1095-1131.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Webb, Diana. Medieval European Pilgrimage, c. 700-
c. 1500. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

III

Shifting Ground:
Crusading and the
Twelfth-Century

Mediterranean

AS JUST OUTLINED, THE SEEDS OF CRUSADING IDEAS
fell on fertile soil in Latin Christendom, generating
ongoing, if at times qualified, enthusiasm. Nonetheless,
the outcome of the crusade of 1147-49 strongly suggests
that the geopolitical context for crusades to the eastern
Mediterranean had changed between 1096 and 1147.
This chapter explores trends in the broader
Mediterranean basin that affected and were affected
by crusading in greater depth. The crusader states were
only some of many new—or newly reshaped—political
configurations that would emerge from one end of the

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

74 | THE CRUSADES

Mediterranean to the other in the twelfth century. These
developments, as well as the continuing evolution and
pursuit of crusading activities in Latin Christendom,
would come to a head—and to an ironically lackluster
denouement—in the eastern Mediterranean crusade of
1189-92.

In the crusader states, life both did and did not change
for those who now found themselves under Latin rule in
the early twelfth century. The immediate aftermath of the
conquest of Jerusalem was grim for Muslims and Jews as
the Latins tried to drive them out of their newly formed
polities. However, it was nothing new to have Christians,
Jews, and Muslims living together in the region, and the
newly arrived Latins eventually realized that harshly
intolerant policies were unsustainable and unprofitable.
Following this realization, new Latin leaders adopted
some elements of preceding Islamic rule. For example,
Muslims, Jews, and non-Latin Christians were assigned a
status similar to that of dhimmis under Islamic rule. All
three groups were legally and socially inferior to Latin
Christians but roughly tolerated. In addition, some forms
of tax administration and other governmental structures
remained essentially the same under Latin leadership.

In other ways, Latins in the crusader states broke
decisively with the recent past and signaled their own
interests and priorities. To build on the example just given,
while Muslims and Jews were required to pay a special
poll tax, non-Latin Christians (called “Syrians” by the

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Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

SHIFTING GROUND | 75

Latins) were not. Furthermore, discrete law courts were
established for “Syrians” and for minor cases involving
different religious and ethnic communities. Extensive
resources were dedicated to refurbishing Christian holy
places, above all the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,
and a new Latin church organization was instituted in
the Kingdom of Jerusalem, at the top of the religious
hierarchy. While some Latin Christians did emigrate to
and settle in the crusader states, in general the Latins
were a minority elite ruling over a mostly non-rebellious
majority of other faiths.

As the twelfth century unspooled, the crusader
states’ neighbor to the northwest, the Byzantine Empire,
engaged in a delicate dance with all regional actors.
Alexios I Komnenos and his successors, John II (brother
of Anna Komnene) and Manuel I, pursued the empire’s
interests by building alliances when possible and winning
outright conflicts when necessary. For both Alexios
and John H, the primary interest of the empire was not
possession of territory or wealth, but rather the traditional
goal of Byzantine foreign policy: recognition of the status
of the empire and the emperor.’” The crusader states—
in particular Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem—
threatened said status, since Byzantine emperors had
always claimed the role of protecting Christian holy
places as well as the headship of the Christian church in
the eastern Mediterranean. Antioch, meanwhile, was not
only significant for military and economic reasons, but
also as a key bishopric.

12 Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, 79.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

76 | THE CRUSADES

From a Byzantine perspective, both Alexios and
John II successfully managed the challenge of the
crusader states. This challenge was certainly active in the
early twelfth century. Bohemond, emboldened by his
successes in the late 1090s, attempted to strike in force
against the Byzantine Empire in 1107. This unsuccessful
campaign resulted in the Treaty of Devol, which dictated
among other things that Bohemond was to hold Antioch
as the emperor’s subordinate. Several decades later,
John II led two armed expeditions into Anatolia and
the eastern Mediterranean. Both times, he primarily
sought recognition of his sovereignty. In 1138, after he
overwhelmed the Latin prince of Antioch with superior
imperial forces, John II led a coalition of Christian forces
against Aleppo, held by the increasingly prominent Sunni
leader, Zangi (more on him below). John and his allies
did not take Aleppo, but the expedition nonetheless
underlined the role of the Byzantine emperor in leading
Christian armies in the eastern Mediterranean. A few years
later, in 1142-43, John began a formidable expedition that
seemed poised to swivel south; John was purportedly
interested in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. What the ultimate
outcome of events would have been is unclear, since John
died suddenly from an infected hunting injury in 1143.
His son, Manuel, then secured the imperial throne.

In the meantime, the pursuit of military jihad against
Latin and Byzantine forces had emerged in both the
rhetoric and internal politics of the Islamicate Levant.
The process was slow and uneven, and complicated by
the fact that all actors in the region—Byzantines, Latins,
Saljuqs, Great Saljuqs, and Fatimids, not to mention

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78 | THE CRUSADES

other minor powers—were often more persuaded by
Realpolitik considerations than religious zealotry. And
despite the initial shock of the Latin conquests, in the
early twelfth century the benefits of alliance with the
Latins often outweighed the risks of military jihad. This
was in part because military jihad was an equally valuable
strategy when facing Muslim opponents as when facing
Christians.

The most passionate and detailed arguments for
organized military jihad against Latins emerged out
of the ranks of religious scholars, in both the eastern
Mediterranean and elsewhere. This is not surprising,
since religious scholars were the ones actively advocating
organized military jihad before 1096. But there are several
factors that make interpreting appeals for military jihad
complicated. The first is that, as just alluded to, military
jihad could be fought against purported heretics within
Islam as well as against non-Muslim opponents. In
addition, scholars debate whether textual references to
military jihad indicate religious motivation or, rather,
simply that Latin Christians were being fought. Lastly,
it is clear that any number of Muslims coexisted and
interacted with Christians (and Jews) in the eastern
Mediterranean, both before and after the First Crusade;
“jihad was not some default mode for Muslim relations
with infidels but rather was invoked for specific reasons in
specific contexts.”

In the specific context of the first half of the twelfth
century, gradually swelling appeals for military jihad

13 Cobb, Race for Paradise, 33.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

SHIFTING GROUND | 79

against the Latins enjoyed popular support. Yet when
we look at the political leaders who seem to have
answered these appeals—and who certainly benefitted
from reputations as powerful and dedicated mujahidun
(“warriors in jihad”)—we see men who mastered
the rhetoric and energy of military jihad in order to
consolidate their own political positions. This does not
necessarily mean they were irreligious. But it does mean
that the history is not one of single-minded, scorched
earth opposition to Christians or Latins, but rather, of
strategic deployment and reinforcement of the rhetoric of
military jihad balanced by pragmatic and astute political
reasoning and supported, always, by diplomacy and
effective military maneuvers.

Itmay be helpful here to recall the risks of generalization
about motives. Few individuals are motivated by one
thing alone and few group activities are populated by
individuals who are all motivated by the same factors.
Bohemond pretty clearly possessed a variety of different
motivations for participating in the First Crusade, and
that in no way guarantees that his fellow crusade leaders—
let alone the majority of crusade participants—shared all
or any of these motives. We are in a similar position when
trying to evaluate the motivations of twelfth-century
rulers like Zangi and Nur al-Din. It seems fair to conclude
they too possessed a variety of motivations, and that
we cannot say with complete certainty whether others
around them or under their command shared precisely
the same priorities.

To bring these points to life, let’s quickly survey the
careers of two major Islamic rulers in twelfth-century

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

80 | THE CRUSADES

west Asia: Zangi and his son Nur al-Din. Both men were
members of a Sunni family that rose to prominence
through merit and political acumen. Both acquired
reputations in their own time and after for their dedication
to Sunni Islam and to jihad. Both engaged in ambitious
maneuvers within a complex and changing political
landscape at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Youll remember from the previous chapters that
the Islamicate eastern Mediterranean on the eve of
the First Crusade had been disrupted, in part due to
the recent arrival of Turkish peoples who had already
converted to Sunni Islam and in part due to a number of
prominent deaths in Baghdad and Cairo. The resulting
disorientation within the Islamicate world was severe,
and this disorientation is usually the first if not the only
factor historians use to explain the Latins’ success during
the First Crusade. Despite the existence of generalized
pro-jihad discourse before 1100, Islamicate military
actions against the Latins in the eastern Mediterranean
in the early twelfth century were fragmented and, with
the exception of the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1119,
largely unsuccessful.

The first major and ongoing Islamicate challenge to the
presence of the Latin crusader states was posed by Zangi,
the son of a former governor of Aleppo. In 1127 the Great
Saljuq sultan named Zangi the governor of Mosul and, in
1128, authorized Zangi to respond militarily to appeals
for help from Aleppo. From that point on, Zangi divided
his time between consolidating and defending his power
base in Mosul and acquiring new conquests in the region.
Zangi was singularly successful in his efforts.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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82 | THE CRUSADES

However, it would be a serious mistake to imagine
that Zangi was primarily or solely motivated by anti-
Christian sentiment. The history of his conquests shows
us a man interested in the consolidation and expansion of
power at the expense of any and all competitors. At the
time, Zangi’s main competitors in west Asia were Muslim.
Indeed, sometimes he faced Muslim and Christian rivals
who had allied together against him. For example, the
conquest of Edessa—so easily and wrongly framed both
then and now as “a Muslim strike against Christendom”—
was a response to a treaty made between the Muslim
Artuqids and Joscelin I, Latin Count of Edessa, which
surely rang alarm bells in Zangi’s mind.

Nonetheless Zangi was known then and now as the
first zealous and successful mujahid against the Latin
presence in the eastern Mediterranean. This is due to the
way he was represented at the time and since. Whatever
his own personal beliefs or religious priorities, it is certain
that those around Zangi commemorated him in terms of
the discourse of military jihad fought against unbelievers
and purported heretics within Islam alike. For their part,
Latin and Byzantine accounts did little to downplay the
idea.

The career of Nur al-Din, Zangi’s second son who
was also based in Aleppo, in many ways mirrored that
of his father. Like Zangi, Nur al-Din strove against both
Muslim and Christian rivals to further increase his power
and holdings. For example, Nur al-Din alternately viewed
Damascus as a convenient ally or a ripe fruit to be plucked
and vigorously squeezed. Like Zangi, he resolutely
succeeded in his efforts. Last but not least, like Zangi, Nur

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

SHIFTING GROUND | 83

al-Din was pervasively commemorated for his efforts as a
mujahid.

What sets Nur al-Din apart from his father is that we
can detect him deliberately and repeatedly employing the
rhetoric and practice of military jihad and Sunni piety
to advance his goals. This meant, among other things,
funding major building projects and endowing religious
institutions. It also meant cracking down on Shi‘ites. It
most certainly meant ensuring good relations with the
sort of prominent Sunni scholars who could write up Nur
al-Din’s efforts most effectively. In short, for Nur al-Din,
as historian Paul Cobb has so eloquently put it, “jihad was
but one plank in a much larger platform.”

Meanwhile, the political situation was similarly
dynamic in the western Mediterranean. You'll remember
that the Almoravids, a pietistic dynasty from north
Africa, had entered the Iberian peninsula in the late
eleventh century. They picked up land in Iberia from
ta’ifa kings and continued to maintain control over most
of northwest Africa into the early twelfth century. They
did not, however, really shift the line between “Christian-
ruled” and “Muslim-ruled” Iberia, and Jews, Christians,
and Muslims continued to live on both sides of that line.

Early in the twelfth century, the Almoravids’ attention
turned to an internal problem: the rise of the Almohads,
another ambitious and religiously zealous dynasty in
north Africa that in its turn claimed the moral high
ground. The subsequent decline of Almoravid power led
to the reestablishment of small fa ‘ifa kingdoms in Iberia.

14 Cobb, Race for Paradise, 45.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

84 | THE CRUSADES

The trend didn’t last long, however; these new ta’ifa
kings soon decided that just as the Almoravids had been
called upon to help in the late eleventh century, so now
the Almohads should be asked to come and lend a hand
against Latin Christian-led forces. The Almohads agreed.

Thus in the early 1140s a number of different players
contested the Iberian peninsula. The Almoravids (rather,
their remnants) were trying to hold onto power. New
ta’ifa kings were attempting to establish themselves while
the Almoravids’ control crumbled. The Almohads were
supporting these new fa’ifa kings with one hand and
trying to place themselves in power with the other. Latin
Christian monarchs from the north were attempting
to expand their own holdings, sometimes in alliance
with one another and sometimes not. These monarchs
increasingly used the rhetoric of crusade to secure papal
support and recruit additional aid for their wars.

Yet crusading rhetoric and religious zeal were not the
only factors encouraging Latin involvement in the Iberian
peninsula. Political ambition also played a role. Urraca of
Leén and Castile and her son and successor, Alfonso VII,
styled themselves “Empress” and “Emperor” respectively,
while (Duke) Afonso Henriques became the first king of
Portugal, thanks in part to the 1147 crusade conquest of
Lisbon. Economics also mattered and economic factors
overlapped with both politics and religion. For example,
at roughly the same time as he used both diplomacy and
military force to subdue Latin Christian rivals in western
Europe, Roger II, Norman King of Sicily, embarked
upon conquests in Islamicate north Africa in the mid-
twelfth century. Roger may have felt piously motivated

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86 | THE CRUSADES

and may equally have been driven by political ambition.
It is certain, though, that there were positive economic
outcomes from his conquests in north Africa. They struck
against pirates based in the region and firmly underlined
the importance of Sicily’s grain exports to the region,
which was at that time in the midst of famine.

To summarize, then, by the early 1140s contemporaries
perceived not one but (at least) three Mediterraneans.
Muslim observers witnessed Latin Christian conquests
in west and east and worried. Latin Christian observers
witnessed the successes of Zangi and Nur al-Din in the
east, and the Almoravids and Almohads in the west, and
worried. Byzantine observers were for the most part
content with the way Alexios I and John II Komnenos
had managed to reassert the Christian primacy of the
Byzantine Empire in the eastern Mediterranean.

The crusade of 1147-49, in particular the expeditions
to the eastern Mediterranean, look rather different seen
in this light. Instead of a simple story of a wave of united
Islamic hostility prompting a renewed and similarly
united defense of Christendom—a story we can now
recognize as reflecting contemporary polemics on all
sides—we see a region continuously contested by actors
with a variety of political, economic, and religious goals.
Even one type of goal could look different from a different
cultural perspective. To give just one example, while both
Latins and Byzantines contested various territories, Latins
more heavily emphasized actual territorial possession,
while Byzantines were more likely to want recognition of
sovereignty.

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SHIFTING GROUND | 87

Furthermore, while some Mediterranean alliances
were made along religious fault lines, others were not.
The singular crusade success of the conquest of Lisbon in
1147 is revealed in part to have been the result of political
fragmentation and related opportunities emerging from
waning Almoravid power. And the Latins’ signal failures
in the eastern Mediterranean in 1148-49 are revealed
to have been in part the result of the Latins’ failure
to successfully understand and maneuver within the
complex network of alliances and enmities in the region.

None of this is intended to suggest that genuine
religious piety was not at play. Clearly, piety was a
motivating factor for groups and individuals on all sides
of the Mediterranean, and clearly, religious identity
mattered. The point is, rather, that religion was not a
singular motivating factor, and it was complicated—at
least for some, perhaps especially those in power—by
political and economic considerations that as often as
not encouraged people to think beyond clear-cut lines of
religious demarcation.

It isa commonplace to claim that after 1149, crusading
morale within Latin Christendom was at a low ebb. While
it is true that the period from 1150-85 did not witness any
major expeditions launched to the eastern Mediterranean,
a number of efforts were made to raise funds or troops for
support of the crusader states, while crusading continued
apace in northern Europe and, especially, Iberia. There,
Almohad conquests in the southern half of the peninsula
led to the mid-century establishment of the Almohad
Caliphate, with a capital at Cordoba. Due to rivalry
among the rulers of northern kingdoms as much as the

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88 | THE CRUSADES

Almohads’ own military acumen, the Almohads seemed
to be ever more permanently settled in Iberia.

In the eastern Mediterranean, meanwhile, by the time
of his death in 1174 Nur al-Din had managed to unite and
restore Sunni authority in the region, including Egypt. He
also empowered the man who would come to symbolize
medieval Islamic rule perhaps more than any other: Salah
al-Din. Nephew of a trusted Kurdish amir who had been
dispatched to pin down Fatimid Egypt once and for all,
Salah al-Din used his position in the newly-subdued
Egypt to vault into power—or perhaps more accurately,
to march carefully and decisively into power over his
rivals, one strategic step at a time.

Step one was to ensure his base in Egypt. Step two was
to position himself as a supporter of Nur al-Din’s rightful
heir, the child al-Salih Isma‘il—and then take control of
al-Salih Isma‘il’s armies in the Levant. Military successes
in the region led to step three, a diploma of rights to
conquered lands received from the ‘Abbasid caliph
directly. Step four was marriage to Nur al-Din’s widow.
When al-Salih Isma‘il died in 1181, it must have seemed
like just another piece serendipitously falling into place.
By 1186, Salah al-Din had subdued his Muslim rivals,
recovered from a mysterious yet serious illness, and clearly
envisioned the next step. This would be war against the
crusader states as a means to bolster his reputation, affirm
his right to lead, silence critics who questioned the piety
of ongoing warfare against Muslims, and pay his troops.
Thus, like his predecessor, Nur al-Din, Salah al-Din used
military jihad as a plank in a larger platform. This doesn’t
mean he lacked religious motivation but rather, that we

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SHIFTING GROUND | 89

should be careful viewers of the image of a pious mujahid
created and recreated both for political ends and popular
entertainment from the twelfth through the twenty-
first centuries, just as we should be careful viewers of
constructed images of pious crusaders.

As he focused on crushing Muslim rivals in the
second half of the twelfth century, Salah al-Din had
naturally made alliances with this or that Latin leader
in the crusader states. After he had subdued his Muslim
opponents, in 1186 he used a breach in a treaty—a raid
on a caravan—as a reason for war with the crusader
states. He soundly defeated the armies of the Kingdom
of Jerusalem in battle at the Horns of Hattin and from
there besieged Jerusalem itself. The city surrendered on
good terms in 1187; in deliberate and decided contrast
to the reported carnage of 1099, the Latins were given
40 days to ransom themselves and their families, and the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher was allowed to stand. In the
aftermath, Salah al-Din ensured that his image was firmly
cast as the generous mujahid who fought against Muslim
adversaries only in order to ultimately achieve victory in
military jihad against Christians, whom he then treated
with compassion.

Compassion notwithstanding, news of Salah al-
Din’s conquest of Jerusalem was met with dismay in
Europe. The papacy moved swiftly to call for a major
joint expedition to the eastern Mediterranean, but these
efforts and genuine popular dismay at the news were
complicated by intra-European politics. Admittedly,
some Latin monarchs were quick to respond. William II
of Sicily sent a fleet to succor Tripoli, Antioch, and

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90 | THE CRUSADES

Tyre in 1188, and Frederick I of Germany, Henry II of
England, and Philip II of France were all eager to crusade.
However, Henry’s eldest son, Richard disrupted things
in his personal bid for power, alternately supporting and
rebelling against his father in conflict with France. (The
irony given Richard’s later reputation as a crusader is not
small.) Henry’s death in 1189 and Richard’s subsequent
coronation as Richard I of England allowed plans for
departure of English and French contingents to resume.
In the meantime, the Germans had stolen a march,
literally, and were confidently moving a massive and well-
organized army overland towards Constantinople.
Things did not go well at Constantinople, and to
understand why, we need to look at changes in the
Byzantine Empire and the crusader states in the later
twelfth century. Beginning in 1143, Manuel Komnenos
in many ways continued the policies of his predecessors
when treating with the crusader states and Latin
Christian powers in Europe. In other words, he sought
to reassert the primacy of his empire as the preeminent
Christian power and protector of the Christian holy
places. He brought Antioch under imperial control,
negotiated successfully with Nur al-Din, and managed
to demonstrate Byzantine overlordship of the Kingdom
of Jerusalem while maintaining friendly relations with its
rulers. Aware of the anti-Byzantine sentiments swirling
in Latin Christendom after the Second Crusade—the
empire made a convenient scapegoat for some—Manuel
cultivated a Latin-friendly reputation while consolidating
Byzantium’s position. Not all Byzantines appreciated this
attitude towards the Latins, however, and Venetians, who

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SHIFTING GROUND | 91

had long taken advantage of unrivalled trading privileges
within the empire, were increasingly reviled. Even
Manuel himself took actions against the Venetians living
in Constantinople in the 1170s.

After Manuel’s death in 1180, political infighting in
Byzantium led to violence that substantially weakened
relations with Latin Christendom. A dramatic coup
placed Andronicus I Komnenos on the throne. While
Jonathan Harris has successfully debunked the idea
that Andronicus and his reign were “anti-Latin,”'
nonetheless, the new emperor ruthlessly cleaned out
the imperial house, and he did not imitate Manuel’s
careful attention to how his actions appeared to Latins.
As a result of this attitude along with coinciding factors,
when Andronicus took Constantinople by force in 1182,
his troops as well as local residents attacked the Italian
merchants in the city, both Genoese and Pisans. Those
unable to flee were slaughtered and their neighborhoods
were looted and destroyed. Unsurprisingly, this news was
received with horror in Latin Christendom. William II
of Sicily saw in events an opportunity to expand his own
holdings. He launched his fleet against Andronicus and
his empire, prompting Andronicus to make peace with
the Venetians and ensure he was on a solid footing with
Salah al-Din. Nonetheless, Andronicus’s reign unraveled
in 1185, leaving the young Isaac Angelos—a relative of the
Komnenians—to grab the imperial throne as Isaac II.

Isaac II Angelos took charge of an empire that had
effectively burned its bridges with Latin Christendom,

15 Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, 121-22 and ongoing.

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Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

92 | THE CRUSADES

both in Europe and the crusader states, at precisely the
moment when Salah al-Din had conquered Jerusalem
itself. He also took charge of an empire facing a number
of separatist rebellions. As he tried to put out the fires,
Isaac continued to pursue diplomatic stability with Salah
al-Din. And then he learned that Frederick I of Germany
was leading a massive army directly to Constantinople.
This was hardly good news, since Frederick was an old
enemy of the empire. Isaac tried to use the same strategies
as Alexios I had in the 1090s, i.e., managing the incoming
Latins while maintaining contact with local Muslim rulers,
but circumstances and attitudes had changed. At the end
of the day, Isaac did not enjoy Alexios’s success with
either Latin or Muslim powers. He must have breathed a
sigh of relief when Frederick’s crusading efforts came to
an anti-climactic end in 1190—Frederick died attempting
to cross a river in Asia Minor—yet upheaval in the eastern
Mediterranean was far from over.

Competition for the crown of the Kingdom of
Jerusalem, and complex relationships between powerful
Latins in the crusader states and western Europe, directly
affected crusading efforts. Some genealogical history is
necessary to grasp this point. After Baldwin I’s death in
1118, a coup placed Baldwin II on the throne. In 1131,
Baldwin II died, leaving royal authority jointly to his eldest
daughter, Melisende, her husband, Fulk of Anjou, and
their son, predictably named Baldwin. Melisende and Fulk
were both strong personalities with the desire and ability
to rule; of the two, Melisende would leave the greatest
mark on the kingdom, surviving Fulk and continuing to
exert dominance even after her son Baldwin III took the

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SHIFTING GROUND | 93

throne. (He had to literally take it via armed rebellion
against his mother and her allies.) Baldwin II died in
1163, and was succeeded by his brother, Amalric.

Amalric left the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a fractious
position when he died in 1174. He had two children
with his first wife, Agnes of Courtenay: Sibylla and
Baldwin IV. He also had a daughter with his second wife,
Maria Komnene (the great-grand niece of John II and
Manuel Komnenos): Isabella I. When Amalric died,
his son Baldwin IV was a minor, which left lots of room
for two factions—Sibylla/Baldwin IV vs. Isabella I—to
scheme and maneuver. In 1176 Sibylla married William
of Montferrat, had a son (of course named Baldwin), and,
after William’s death in 1177, married Guy of Lusignan.

Sibylla and her brother Baldwin IV had been relatively
closely allied, but he and Guy did not get on well, to the
extent that as king, Baldwin overlooked his sister Sibylla’s
rights to the crown and named her son (Baldwin V) as
his heir. Baldwin IV famously died from leprosy in 1185,
and Baldwin V—who had always been weak—died in
1186. Sibylla was crowned queen, and after agreeing to
annul her marriage so long as she could choose her own
husband, she promptly chose Guy and crowned him as
her king consort. To summarize, in the late 1080s, the
monarchs of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Sibylla and
Guy) faced internal rivals (supporters of Isabella I); the
Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelos was trying to get
his house in order and repair the damage done to Latin-
Byzantine relations; and Salah al-Din advanced on the
crusader states.

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94 | THE CRUSADES

Rivals continued to strive for the crown of Jerusalem
even after Salah al-Din took Jerusalem itself. Guy, then
king, had been taken prisoner by Salah al-Din at Hattin.
Finally ransomed, Sibylla and Guy were refused entry into
Tyre by Conrad of Montferrat, who had long supported
Isabella I. Sibylla and Guy responded by besieging the
Muslim-held city of Acre with minimal troops. The
strategy worked; so many Latins joined Sibylla and Guy
to besiege Acre that Conrad was forced to come to terms.
This success came at a cost, however, as Sibylla and their
two daughters, Alice and Maria, died of dysentery during
the siege. The crusader states were attempting to fight an
external threat (Salah al-Din) while also contending with
internal conflict over the crown and weakened relations
with Byzantium.

When Latins from Europe arrived to crusade in the
eastern Mediterranean, they intensified these problems—
and added some new ones of their own. Richard I of
England and Philip II of France joined Guy in opposing
Salah al-Din at Acre, but on their voyage across the
Mediterranean their own relationship had been strained.
In Sicily, Richard used violence to get his sister’s dowry
back and more. Richard was then joined by his fiancée,
Berengaria of Navarre, and resumed the crusade. This may
have infuriated Philip, since Richard had previously been
engaged to Philip’s sister. When some English crusaders
and their goods were held by a Byzantine break-away
ruler on Cyprus, Richard seized the pretext to invade and
conquer the island. In so doing he also helped generate
a justification for assaults on Byzantine lands that would
prove influential in coming years, namely, that such

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SHIFTING GROUND | 95

assaults were justified if they advanced crusading efforts.
As a result of Richard’s delays, he arrived at Acre two
months after Philip. Richard was considerably richer in
both lucre and military reputation but he had weakened
his relationship with Philip.

This relationship could only weaken further when,
at Acre, Philip and Richard had to take sides on the
question of who should wear the crown of the Kingdom
of Jerusalem. Since Sibylla and her two daughters had
died, the heiress to Jerusalem was Sibylla’s younger half-
sister, Isabella I. One faction liked the idea of dissolving
Isabella’s current marriage and remarrying her to Conrad
of Montferrat—as would eventually happen—while
another faction continued to back Guy, Sibylla’s widower.
Into this heady political stew sailed Richard (distantly
related to Guy) and Philip (Conrad’s cousin). The two
European monarchs agreed to decide who should really
rule the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This assumed, of course,
that they could get the city of Jerusalem back.

Despite all this political drama, Richard and Philip and
their crusader state allies nonetheless managed to outlast
Salah al-Din and his armies and achieve the surrender of
Acre in July 1191. In the same month the two European
monarchs announced a compromise solution for rule
of the Kingdom of Jerusalem that would, like any good
compromise, make everyone unhappy: Guy would reign
for his life and Isabella I and Conrad of Montferrat would
succeed him. No doubt vigorously shaking his head and
washing his hands all the way, Philip quietly gave Conrad
his half of Acre and returned swiftly to Europe. He left
behind any number of Frankish crusaders who doubted

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96 | THE CRUSADES

Richard’s leadership of the crusade and disliked the
agreed-upon compromise. At the same time, Salah al-
Din’s forces were not entirely thrilled with his leadership,
either. Richard had executed approximately 3000
prisoners of war after the surrender of Acre. Among Salah
al-Din’s forces, a desire for retribution was accompanied
by the sense that their leader should have been able to
prevent the mass execution.

Richard’s advance to Jerusalem was thus hindered not
only by effective military resistance from Salah al-Din and
the strategic difficulties of the march, but also the fact that
Latin forces were not unified under his leadership. Indeed,
Conrad of Montferrat and his followers negotiated behind
Richard’s back with Salah al-Din, even while Richard
himself was trying to secure a diplomatic end to the
crusade. Illness proved the final straw for Richard, and in
1192, he and Salah al-Din signed a treaty that would last
just over three years.

In some ways this was a lose-lose situation. The treaty
did not give the Latins Jerusalem, and yet it was not a full
victory for Salah al-Din either, who had been shown to be
unable to fully defeat the Latin forces; both his resources
and his cachet among his own troops had diminished.
The only potential winners were Isabella I and her new
husband, the crusader Count Henry of Champagne
(Conrad of Montferrat had been assassinated). Isabella
and Henry confidently asserted rule of the Kingdom of
Jerusalem despite the fact that the city itself remained in
Salah al-Din’s possession.

The events of 1189-92 are remembered and depicted
with full chivalric display in histories and modern pop

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SHIFTING GROUND | 97

culture alike. Both Richard I and Salah al-Din have been
romanticized for centuries now, invested with glamor,
charisma, and prowess by generation after generation
of writers and artists. The conflict is often colored in
epic shades, as nothing less than a civilizational battle
between Christianity and Islam. There are deep ironies,
therefore, in the actual history. First, any number of
intra-Christian fractures undermined the crusade, and
intra-Christian jostling strongly influenced its outcome.
Second, said outcome was a disappointment for virtually
all concerned. Disappointment among Salah al-Din’s men
was underlined by his death in 1193. Disappointment in
Latin Christendom was intensified by the fact that the
mid-1190s saw crushing and seemingly decisive Almohad
victories in Iberia. Yet Latin crusading enthusiasm did
not die following these disappointments, just as it did not
die following the feeble outcome of the crusade of 1147-
49. Rather, it throve, and soon it would be empowered
and expressed in new ways thanks to a vital new pope,
Innocent III.

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98 | THE CRUSADES

Further Reading

Birk, Joshua. Norman Kings of Sicily and the Rise of Anti-
Islamic Critique: Baptized Sultans. New York:
Palgrave/MacMillan, 2016.

Chibnall, Marjorie. The Normans. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2006.

Christie, Niall. Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity’s Wars
in the Middle East, 1095-1382, from the Islamic
Sources. Abingdon and New York: Routledge,
2014.

Cobb, Paul M. The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History
of the Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014.

Earenfight, Theresa. Queenship in Medieval Europe. New
York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Eddé, Anne-Marie. Saladin. Cambridge MA: Belknap/
Harvard University Press, 2014.

Harris, Jonathan. Byzantium and the Crusades. 2nd ed.
London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
MacEvitt, Christopher. The Crusades and the Christian
World of the East: Rough Tolerance. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

O’Callaghan, Joseph F. Reconquest and Crusade in
Medieval Spain. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Allies and Adversaries:
Crusading Culture and
Intra-Christian Crusades

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER MADE A FEW POINTS CLEAR.
First, the outcomes of crusading in the twelfth century and
its future prospects were interpreted in a variety of ways
depending on the perspective of the interpreters. Second,
while religious ideas and rhetoric played an important
role around the Mediterranean, they were not the only
motivating factors in play. Third, alliances and conflicts
did not fall into the neat grooves predicted by modern
assumptions about an ongoing “clash of civilizations.” The
events of 1187-92 put in sharp relief the ironic difference
between the history and mythology of the crusades.

This chapter focuses on Latin Christendom in
greater detail in order to expand upon the latter two

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100 | THE CRUSADES

points. All the crusading events discussed in preceding
chapters were supported and influenced by a rich and
diverse assortment of ideas and practices that interwove
crusading with other aspects of Latin Christian devotion,
society, politics, and culture. At the same time, as we
have already seen in the case of the relationship between
Richard I of England and Philip II of France, crusading
was both fueled and complicated by internecine conflict.
Different Latin Christian leaders sought control of both
crusading and Christendom itself.

In 1197, five years after the truce between Richard I
and Salah al-Din ended, Henry VI of Germany—son
of Frederick I, who had died so anticlimactically in
an Anatolian river—launched a crusade to the eastern
Mediterranean. He in turn died anticlimactically in Italy
before the ships sailed. Just one year later, in 1198, a new
pope was elected: Innocent II. Innocent was then in
his late thirties, positively overflowing with ideas about,
ambitions for, and confidence in his office and church.
He was undaunted by apparent setbacks like ominous
royal deaths on the brink of crusade. Indeed, he has been
rightly deemed the pope who “contributed more to the
[crusading] movement than any other individual except
Urban II.”'*

When Innocent became pope in 1198, he inherited
a well-developed set of crusading theories, legalities,

16 Riley-Smith, Crusades, 174.

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 101

and practices honed by prior popes, apologists, and
canon lawyers over the past century. When Urban II
had preached in 1095 and when the earliest writers
constructed a context of meaning for the First Crusade in
the early twelfth century, many of the details of crusading
were still murky. Admittedly, some legal protections and
incentives for crusaders had been put in place in the late
eleventh century, and the spiritual benefits of an armed
expedition-qua-pilgrimage seemed relatively clear to
contemporaries, even if they didn’t always agree on the
exact nature of those benefits. But even after 1099 it was
still unclear who could make crusading vows and what
such vows entailed, who should have (or could have)
control over avowed crusaders, what distinguished an
expedition like the First Crusade from other wars (holy or
otherwise) or armed pilgrimages, and—of course—how
such costly endeavors were to be financed.

In the twelfth century members of the Latin church
attempted to pin down a few of these points. “Attempted”
is the key word here, since church dictates were not
always heeded. For example, the papacy consistently
called for individual crusaders to take vows after a papal
proclamation, but it’s clear not everyone agreed. Some
continued to think vow-taking was something to be done
on a more ad hoc and spontaneous basis. The papacy
likewise consistently claimed the privilege to proclaim
and supervise crusades. Again, not everyone agreed
with this in practice, despite the comprehensive work of
canon lawyers who used the whole battery of Christian
authorities to prove that war could be authorized only
by God or his representative, the pope. Of course, even

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102 | THE CRUSADES

if there had been theoretical agreement that popes could
launch and oversee crusades, the logistics of leading
years-long military campaigns in multiple different places
did not favor direct papal command. Additionally, even
the most idealistic popes might be willing to give post-
hoc authorization to a promising campaign that was
already underway.

When it came to the theology of the remission of sins,
papal and ecclesiastical authority to grant indulgences
had increased, while the general theme—crusading
was spiritually beneficial because God considered it
meritorious—had remained relatively consistent.’’ In the
later twelfth century, this theme was joined by the belief
that crusading success reflected the spiritual health or
lack thereof of Christendom as a whole, not merely those
who directly participated.

Innocent II firmly embraced the idea that crusading
outcomes reflected the overall spiritual health of
Christendom, an entity that he located equally firmly
under papal (not Byzantine) direction. All of the crusades
he oversaw reflected an overarching concern with the
spiritual well-being of Christendom and the role played by
the papacy in ensuring it. The varied targets of crusading
under Innocent—Muslims, Christian “heretics,” Latin
Christian political adversaries of the papacy—reflected
twin convictions: first, that Latin Christendom faced
internal as well as external threats; and second, that the

17 Ane L. Bysted, The Crusade Indulgence: Spiritual Rewards
and the Theology of the Crusades, c. 1095-1216 (Leiden: Brill,
2015), 278-79.

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 103

pope should lead the charge against them all. Thus both
Innocent’s crusades and his substantial religious reforms
and initiatives, perhaps most clearly documented in the
extensive decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215,
reflected his desire to build a better and more Latin
Christendom.

Innocent III established a number of procedures and
precedents for crusading that would extend beyond the
end of his papacy. He emphasized that while crusade vows
were voluntary, crusading was truly a moral requirement
for all Christians. He underscored the importance of
devotional practices at home, including crusade-focused
rituals and liturgies, to help ensure crusading success.
He promoted a system of clerical taxation to help fund
crusades and starting in the early thirteenth century, he
allowed both men and women to fulfill crusade vows
through monetary payments. In line with his process-
oriented approach, crusade preaching under Innocent
became more systematic, detailed, and explicit, as did
the legal rights afforded to crusade participants and the
financial arrangements that made any expedition possible.

Yet despite the efforts of Innocent II and all the
popes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, crusading
was never truly controlled by the church or the pope, as
Innocent would experience the hard way. One reason for
this was logistical; crusading depended on lay leaders for
financial and military implementation. A second, more
profound reason was that the papacy wasn’t alone in
developing the practices of crusading and considering the
ways in which those practices reflected greater truths or
deeper priorities. Different members of Latin Christian

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104 | THE CRUSADES

society—lay and ecclesiastic, men and women—wove
crusading into broader and co-evolving cultural patterns.
One such pattern lay in devotional culture. The
crusades can be seen as part of a broader phenomenon
that historians call “lay piety’—practices and actions
taken by the laity in order to express, promote, and
celebrate their religious beliefs. Participating in a crusade,
either by bearing arms or providing funds and other kinds
of support for an expedition, could be one such practice.
Other practices—many of which intersected with
crusading in one way or another—involved donations of
money or land to pious organizations or religious orders,
pilgrimage, support for church liturgies or programs of
prayers, joining local organizations such as lay fraternities
or religious orders, revering relics, and centering religious
devotions on the cross and Christ’s victory and suffering
thereon. Crusading and these other devotional practices
intersected with and reinforced each other in a multitude
of ways, and this can make it hard to read the particular
meaning of a particular symbol, activity, or rhetorical
phrase. To give just one example, the cross became the
symbol par excellence of crusading, but it was also the
symbol par excellence of Christianity more broadly.
Another pattern concerned the moral value of
violence. The idea and rhetoric of Christian violence
as a moral good was powerful and popular. In the early
thirteenth century, Innocent III confidently claimed
that crusading was nothing less than “a means of

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 105

salvation.”'* But crusading was not the only context in
which contemporaries sought for a way to perform their
customary violence as moral agents. The twelfth century
was also pivotal for the development of ideas related to
medieval chivalry. The word chivalry comes from the
Old French chevalerie, a noun which meant a group of
warriors on horseback (“knights” in English) and/or a
set of behaviors and values associated with said warriors.
For our purposes, we can think of chivalry as the idea,
developing apace in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
that knightly violence reflected the elite social and moral
status of its agents. This violence and its elite moral status
were explicitly Christian.

Chivalry and crusading fed and informed each other.
This was in part because of shared ideas about the
possibility of performing violence as a moral good. It was
also because of shared participants and enthusiasts. At the
same time, crusading and chivalry were not precisely the
same thing and were not performed by precisely the same
individuals. Indeed, at times the two cultural patterns
were in direct conflict. For example, while tournaments
were a key chivalric practice, they were seen by some as
a distraction from the “real work” of crusading and other
wars.

Economics, too, informed and were affected by
crusading. The First Crusade and the establishment of
the crusader states had given Italian merchants and their
home city-states an important landing stage in the eastern

18 Innocent III, Quia maior (1213) quoted in Riley-Smith,
Crusades, 199.

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106 | THE CRUSADES

Mediterranean. These landing stages were important
not only for their physical location, but also because
of the generous political privileges granted to Italian
communities by Latin (and at times Byzantine) rulers—
privileges they were not granted by, for example, the city
of Alexandria.

Arguably both the economic motives of Latin
crusaders from merchant communities, as well as their
religious fervor, drove participation in crusading—or,
at least, affected the ways in which that participation
was undertaken. At the same time, as David Abulafia
has emphasized, we have to recognize that the crusades
did not cause these economic developments, but rather,
developments already underway in the eleventh century
made crusading technologically possible.’ And as with
chivalry, economics and crusading were sometimes
at odds, at least in the eyes of some. From the mid-
twelfth century onwards, the papacy attempted to
impose boycotts on Mediterranean trade that had the
potential to provide resources to the crusaders’ enemies.
“Attempted” is the key word, since these boycotts were
never completely respected nor consistently enforced. At
the same time as crusading aligned with some economic
trends, crusading aggression was directly at odds with the
pluralistic interactions that more regularly defined trade
in Afro-Eurasia.

19 David Abulafia, “Trade and Crusade, 1050-1250,” in The
Eastern Mediterranean Frontier of Latin Christendom, ed.
Jace Stuckey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 373-92.

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 107

Another cultural pattern connected crusading
with ideas and practices of family heritage, especially
among social elites. Even during the First Crusade,
we can discern patterns of participation that reflected
family sentiment and cooperation. Crusade vows were
individual, but the effort was—had to be—familial since
crusading was a costly endeavor that left one’s family and
possessions at risk during one’s absence. Family support
was therefore essential in two ways: first, to help raise
funds for those crusading; and second, to ensure the
maintenance and protection of family and possessions at
home during the crusade. Thus there were quite practical
reasons why generational participation in crusading can
be traced among families. In addition, however, patterns
of family participation in crusading reflects the fact
that the family—one’s lineage—was a central locus for
communication, identity, and prestige.

Indeed, crusading rapidly became a key part of many
noble family identities, a proud example of courage, piety,
and prowess across the generations. In the first half of the
twelfth century, multiple families actively commemorated
the deeds of forebears on crusade and linked those deeds
with present actions. We can identify conscious callbacks
to a family’s crusading past in everything from pious
donations, the taking of religious vows, the endowment
of art and architecture, the writing of family histories,
and the pursuit of chivalric reputation in battle, all the
way to the ultimate act of imitation: participating in a
crusade oneself. Over the decades and centuries to come,
participating in—and sometimes dying on—a crusade

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108 | THE CRUSADES

became a virtually obligatory family tradition for many,
performed by each successive generation in turn.

Furthermore, when we examine political dynamics
within the crusader states, we see complicated webs of
family relationships linking western Europe to the eastern
Mediterranean. We've already discussed how both
Philip II of France and Richard I of England were related
to the two contenders for the Kingdom of Jerusalem in
the late twelfth century. Additionally, the family trees
of Frederick I of Germany and Melisende I of Jerusalem
were intertwined over multiple generations. Likewise,
powerful noble families existed and operated alongside
and among the royals. For example, it is hard to discuss
almost any dispute about government, law, or crusading
in the Latin eastern Mediterranean in the thirteenth
century without referencing the Ibelin family, which
was alternately linked to various thrones by marriage.
The crusades were about Christian brotherhood and
sisterhood, but they were about actual brothers, sisters,
and other kin, too.

Tying together violence, nobility, family, and chivalry
were ideas about gender heavily inflected by social class.
Latin crusading sources repeatedly emphasized the
“manliness” of crusaders and their actions. It’s key to
recognize that crusading masculinities—like medieval
masculinities in general—were plural. Latin Christian
men operated in a world with multiple, overlapping
ideas of what it meant to be a man. In the context of the
crusades, masculinities could certainly be performed
through violence, but they could also be performed
through self-denial and endurance of suffering, sexual

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 109

self-control, courage, preservation of family honor, love
for one’s Christian “siblings,” and general piety.

At the same time, crusading was not just a man’s world.
Women were essential and active agents in virtually
every aspect of crusading, though their roles have often
been obscured by the biases of the written source record
and modern assumptions about medieval women. At
the most basic level, women played a significant role
in the transmission and encouragement of crusading
ideals; family participation has been traced repeatedly
to networks of female kin among the noble and royal
houses of Europe. Until Innocent HI did away with the
stipulation, wives had to grant consent to husbands who
wished to take crusade vows. Female family members
usually needed to consent to—if not directly implement—
the sale, transfer, or management of family property and
wealth necessary to fund crusading. Sometimes women
did much more than consent. Circa 1300, a group of
Genoese noblewomen banded together to raise funds
and make plans on their own initiative for a crusade; their
efforts were endorsed by the papacy.

Women’s roles in crusading often included political,
military, and family leadership. In the absence of male
family members, noble women ruled and protected not
only their family but their polities. Additionally, women
took crusade vows themselves, and there are examples
of queens and noble women leading their own armies on
crusade, either alone or side-by-side with their husbands,
as Eleanor of Castile and Edward I of England did in
the thirteenth century. Meanwhile, in the Kingdom of

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110 | THE CRUSADES

Jerusalem, powerful queens like Melisende and Sibylla
ruled deftly in their own right.

While the vast majority of our evidence relates to noble
and royal women, we do have evidence that women of
other social classes were also involved. Written accounts
of crusades describe women (in the generic) assisting
and supporting armies, even wielding arms in extreme
circumstances. We also know that women were abducted,
enslaved, tortured, and killed; on no side did crusading
violence exclude women and children, as modern ideas
about “chivalry” or the treatment of civilians might lead
us to expect. Other women (and men) became non-
combatant Templars or Hospitallers, joining European
houses of these military orders.

In a few cases we can identify the involvement of
individual women of non-elite birth in the crusading
movement. For example, Saint Catherine of Siena
actively advocated for crusading in the fourteenth
century; although her religious reputation later granted
her considerable social privilege, she was born the
daughter of a cloth-dyer. Most notably, an Englishwoman
named Margaret of Beverly bore arms and was wounded
in the defense of Jerusalem in 1187. Subsequently she was
captured and escaped captivity on several occasions. We
know of Margaret’s story because her younger brother,
an English monk named Thomas, wrote an account
of her experiences “to the glory of God and for love of

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 111

his sister.”*? Margaret’s story neatly illuminates the
interpretative dilemma facing historians who seek to
evaluate the history of women and crusading: even when
women’s experiences reach us, they do so predominantly
through men’s voices, whether those voices seek to praise,
blame, or disregard.

You'll note that all of these patterns are concerned,
at some level, with identity—Latin Christian identity,
class identity, family identity, gender identity. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, then, attitudes towards Jews, Muslims,
pagans, and heretics, and ideas about how they should
be treated by Christians, also formed an axis of identity
that intersected with crusading. While we can outline an
overall increase in intolerance and persecution towards
all four groups during the period from 1050-1600, there
are nonetheless some key differences. In the case of
Jews, Latin Christian attitudes moved from general if
ambivalent tolerance in the early Middle Ages to active
intolerance, persecution, and expulsion in the later
Middle Ages. In the case of Muslims, Latin Christian
attitudes shifted from rough tolerance, and for a number
of Latin Christian intellectuals, respect or envy for the
cultural achievements of the Islamicate world, to active
intolerance and expulsion. Attitudes towards pagans and
heretics remained largely the same: pagans continued
to face a combination of Christian missions and violent

20 Thomas of Froidmont, “The Adventures of Margaret of
Beverly, A Woman Crusader,” trans. Emilie Amt, in The
Crusades: A Reader, ed. S.J. Allen and Emilie Amt, 2nd ed.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 204-08.

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112 | THE CRUSADES

conquest/forced conversion, and heretics continued to
be subject to church-sanctioned violence executed by lay
authorities. Notwithstanding, later in the Middle Ages
these trends were expressed via crusading and buttressed
by new ecclesiastical institutions, like the Inquisition.
The general movement towards increasing persecution of
those deemed deviant has been persuasively linked to the
desire to define and secure Latin Christian identity and
hegemony. At the same time, it is well worth reiterating
that these are broad generalizations on a vast scale.
Relations between individuals and faith communities
varied considerably, and local factors were often decisive.

For some Latin Christians, all these various elements
of crusading identity combined with local or regional
sentiments—even what we might call proto-nationalism.
For example, from the First Crusade onwards, the
Franks self-identified as the crusading gens (“people”)
par excellence. This connection between the Franks
and crusading—and in particular, Frankish monarchs
and crusading—would be most spectacularly claimed by
Louis IX of France in the mid-thirteenth century. On the
other side of the Channel, one of the legacies of Richard I’s
crusading role was to link his reign, and through him the
English crown, to crusading. Similar trends played out
on a smaller scale in specific counties or localities. They
also played out in more all-encompassing ways, beyond
monarchy. In twelfth-century Iberia, crusading rhetoric
increasingly fused with particularly local concerns and
ambitions. In many ways, the second half of the twelfth
century witnessed the beginning of war depicted in terms

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 113

of proto-national as well as religious liberation in Latin
Christian Iberia.

All of these cultural patterns met at some points and
diverged at others. And all of them were reinforced or
propagated by individuals at various levels of society, lay
and ecclesiastical alike. It is tempting to imagine a fixed,
unequivocal divide between “lay” and “ecclesiastical”
ideas, but such a divide doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. While
there are some precise points on which there was a clear
divide between ecclesiastical and lay perspectives—for
example, anti-Jewish violence and chivalric tournaments
were pretty consistently criticized by members of the
church—most of these cultural patterns can be identified
in textual and visual/material sources produced by and
for both ecclesiastics and the laity. On reflection, this isn’t
surprising. After all, lay and ecclesiastical elites were often
directly related by blood. Ecclesiastical elites were born
and raised within lay environments, and the laity were
often proactively concerned with their piety, educated by
members of the church, and liable to join a religious order
later in life. Likewise, those responsible for vernacular
literature were primarily educated by members of the
church.

It may be especially tempting to imagine that the
church promoted more “pious” and orderly ideas
of crusading, while the laity were responsible for
enthusiastic and gory celebrations of violence. However,
the past few decades of research have shown this to be
inaccurate in several ways. Members of the church wrote
the bloodiest descriptions of the slaughter in Jerusalem in
1099. Members of the church joined the laity in advancing

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114 | THE CRUSADES

the idea that crusading constituted an act of vengeance.
One ecclesiastical account described an abbot calling for
indiscriminate slaughter of the people of Beziers in 1209
during the Albigensian Crusade, saying “Kill them all. For
the Lord knows who are his.”?! (While this later account
may well be inaccurate, it was written from a pro-crusade
perspective; in other words, the quote was ascribed to the
abbot as a mark in his favor.) Not only was the rhetoric of
violence embedded in Christian thought and piety from
a very early date—in Latin Christian monasticism” as
well as both Latin and Byzantine imperial ideologies—
but through the Middle Ages, some clerics continued to
themselves commit acts of violence, which were judged
positively or negatively depending on the motives
believed to underlay the acts.* The point is not that
the Latin church was in some way corrupt or morally
deficient, but rather that at this time, ideas of Christian
violence existed throughout society, not just among the
laity.

It would similarly be a mistake to imagine that
everyone was in favor of crusading. There were critics.
That said, there wasn’t widespread and pervasive
criticism, nor was criticism primarily focused on the

21 Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, quoted in
Tyerman, God’s War, 591.

22 Katherine Allen Smith, War and the Making of Medieval
Monastic Culture (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011).

23 Craig M. Nakashian, Warrior Churchmen of Medieval
England, 1000-1250 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press,
2016).

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 115

idea of Christian violence itself. The crusading failures
of 1147-49 prompted the most sustained critique, and
that critique was directed at how the related expeditions
were undertaken. In the later twelfth century onwards,
criticism tended to come either from those who were
critical of either the papacy or a particular pope, those
who had interests in crusading funds being used for other
endeavors, or those who felt that crusading was being
mismanaged in some other way. In other words, criticism
mainly focused on how crusading was implemented
rather than on the concept of crusading itself.

Equally it would be a mistake to think that those who
supported crusading consistently agreed and cooperated
with each other. Crusading was as often a weapon for
internecine conflict within Latin Christendom as it was
a foundation for unity. The history of crusading between
1100 and 1250 is punctuated by tussles between different
Latin Christian leaders who sought to control crusading,
Christendom, or some piece thereof. In fact, we've
already seen this occur between different lay leaders
on crusade or about crusading. On the First Crusade,
Bohemond and Raymond IV of Toulouse were famously
at odds. Moving into the twelfth century, some accounts
blamed infighting between Raymond of Poitiers, Prince
of Antioch, and his nephew Louis VII of France for the
crusading failure at Damascus in 1148, while Conrad of
Germany had taken the overland route due to conflict
with Roger II of Sicily. In the later twelfth century, as
discussed in the previous chapter, there were significant
tensions between Richard I of England and Philip II of
France, as well as between contenders for the crown of

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116 | THE CRUSADES

Jerusalem. These are just the most notable and obvious
examples of an ongoing reality. Such intra-Christian
conflicts variously reflected disagreement over inevitable
logistical matters and tactical issues, preexisting tensions,
concurrent hostilities, or new rivalries emerging in the
face of potential risks and rewards.

At the same time, Christian politics in the eastern
Mediterranean were similarly complicated, both within
the crusader states themselves, between various crusader
states and the Byzantine Empire, and between the
Byzantine Empire and Latin crusaders from Europe.
And of course, the relationship between the papacy and
all of the above actors—including lay crusade leaders—
also fluctuated. The previous chapters have already given
plenty of examples of such complexities, and how they
both affected and were affected by crusading. Some may
be inclined to conclude that given such clear failures to
operate as a unified religio-political unit, Christianity
in the period was nothing more than a superficial gloss
applied to crass power negotiations. Yet that too would
be a mistake. When we look at intra-Christian relations in
the medieval Mediterranean, we see that both Realpolitik
considerations and central theological issues served
as grounds for conflicts or alliances, depending upon
circumstances and the individuals involved.

The alternating ally/adversary status of virtually
all Christian actors in the crusades demonstrates the
complex realities of contemporary warfare, religion, and
politics. It furthermore provides a necessary corrective
to an imagined Christian unity of the crusades. The many
crusades supported by Innocent II and his successors

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 117

in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries serve
to underline the point and to further illustrate how
crusading was itself a political tool—or weapon, as the
case may be—within Latin Christendom.

The crusade of 1202-04 (labelled by nineteenth-
century historians the Fourth Crusade) was first aimed
at Egypt; it famously wound up sacking the Byzantine
capital, Constantinople. The question of why the crusade
ended in this way has been debated for a long time in great
detail. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that both
the initial diversion to Constantinople and the eventual
decision to attack the city reflect two main factors: power
relations in the Mediterranean and the practical needs of
crusading—for transport, for funds, for supplies, and for
decisive, on-the-ground leadership. The papacy called
for the crusade, but the expedition was in reality led by
a number of Frankish and Italian nobles and depended
on the economic powerhouse of Venice. Venice and
the Byzantine Empire were alternately political and
economic allies and rivals, and the exiled-yet-hopeful
Byzantine prince Alexios IV Angelos was related to Latin
crusade leaders by marriage; he was ready to promise any
number of unlikely things in return for help regaining
his throne. In the meantime, the crusade was in need of
financial resources, and with the conquest of Cyprus in
1191, Richard I of England had arguably set a precedent
for justified attacks on Byzantine possessions if doing so
supplied a crusade.

The Latin conquest of Constantinople was by no
means “fated” or in any way predetermined, but it also
isn’t surprising given the circumstances and context

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118 | THE CRUSADES

just noted. It also wasn’t universally condemned in the
Latin sphere. There were differences of opinion within
Latin Christendom and among the crusaders themselves
about the conquest, and during events Innocent III was
outraged by his lack of control and issued rapid-fire
excommunications. Nonetheless, in pretty short order the
Latin consensus was that the conquest of Constantinople
was a moral good that would benefit Christianity. After
all, it “reunited” the churches under Latin leadership, it
flooded Europe with a wealth of relics and other Christian
objects looted from Constantinople, and it (briefly)
established a Latin Empire, which, it was hoped, would
aid future crusading efforts in the eastern Mediterranean.
Despite all this, some may still be disposed to view the
Fourth Crusade as not a “real” crusade. Such a view
would ignore the fact that there had been intra-Christian
fighting, contention, and conquest framed in terms of
righteous violence from the First Crusade onwards, if not
before. (Such a view may also imply that a holy war fought
against non-Christians is “better” than one fought against
Christians. )

Of course, at stake in all such labels as “intra-
Christian” is who gets to decide the religious identity of
those involved. The Albigensian Crusade (1209-29) was
directed at Cathars—heretics from one vantage point,
Christians from another—and their noble sympathizers
in what we would now call southern France. The papacy
had been concerned about the reports of heresy for
decades and for almost as long had been trying to entice
the northern Frankish kings to crusade in the south.
King Philip II was finally persuaded to give his nobles

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120 | THE CRUSADES

permission to act when Innocent III gave participants in
the crusade permission to take and keep the lands and
goods of “heretics” or their protectors.

Depending on perspective, this crusade was either
a pious cleansing of a heresy-infested nest of vipers or
a convenient way to expand northern Frankish power
and wealth at the expense of a southern region that had
previously been all too prosperous. Once it was underway,
people in the targeted region viewed it as blatant
territorial expansion and most unholy violence, and
fought hard and long to defend their homes. Indeed, the
crusade was fought especially brutally by both sides, even
though or perhaps because in many cases, it was neighbor
fighting neighbor. Twenty years of war led to a significant
and permanent realignment of power within what would
become France: southern regional power and cultural
identity were diminished, northern royal and cultural
power and influence were heightened. In addition, the
church wound up launching the Dominican Order and
creating the institution of the Inquisition, because despite
the decades of carnage, heresy in the region persisted.

Like the Latin conquest of Constantinople, this crusade
is sometimes mistakenly seen as a dramatic change in
crusading ideas and practices. It’s key to remember that
violence against heretics had always been positively
encouraged within the Christian tradition. Further,
such violence was always supposed to be executed by lay
leaders at the direction of the pope. What was new in the
early thirteenth century was the specific and deliberate
use of crusading to perpetrate this violence, although
even in that respect, it’s possible to overstate the degree

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122 | THE CRUSADES

of change. After all, First Crusade sources tell us about
crusaders fighting “heretics” in the eastern Mediterranean
in the late eleventh century, and in their letters, crusaders
begged Urban II to help them extirpate “heresies” they
were encountering. So perhaps it is more accurate to say
that what was new was the scale of violence directed at
purported heretics—and heretics alone—via crusading.
It’s also possible to inaccurately assume that the
Latin conquest of Constantinople and crusading in
southern France reflect the loss of “true” crusading piety.
According to such a view, early crusades (especially the
First Crusade) were undertaken by “true” believers
motivated by sincere and fervent piety, but as time went
on, such pious considerations were weakened by worldly,
selfish motivations based on political or economic factors.
However, we would have to overlook a lot of historical
evidence to approve this interpretation of the past. First,
we would have to ignore all the evidence for a range of
perspectives and motives for participants in the First
Crusade. As already discussed in earlier chapters, even
Urban II had pressing and obvious political reasons for
launching the expedition as and when he did. Second,
we would have to ignore the evidence for a similar
range of perspectives and motives in early thirteenth-
century crusading. Third, we would have to impose an
anachronistic set of values onto the medieval past in order
to conclude that religious piety is necessarily distinct
from any and all political and economic considerations.
Indeed, the history of the crusades is the history of
many connections that may seem surprising to modern
eyes. Some of these connections are between analytical

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 123

spheres that may be considered separate—“religion” and
“politics” and “economics”—while others are between
regions or peoples thought to have been distant and
distinct. The early thirteenth-century crusades remind
us that from the start, crusading divided some Christians
at the same time as it unified others, and crusades were
undertaken because they were considered advantageous—
spiritually above all, perhaps, but often politically and
economically, too.

All these trends continued to be reflected in crusading
to the eastern Mediterranean in the early thirteenth
century. The first major expedition after the Latin
conquest of Constantinople is usually dated to 1213-21
(and labelled the Fifth Crusade by nineteenth-century
historians). Like previous expeditions, it aimed at Egypt.
It was unsuccessful from the Latin perspective, and it
was not led or substantially powered by the Franks, who
were preoccupied by the crusades in southern France.
Most ironically, one of the most prominent individuals to
take the cross did not in fact participate in the crusade:
Frederick I.

The career of Frederick II, King of Sicily and Germany
and Holy Roman Emperor, impeccably illustrates the
cultural complexities and intra-Christian conflicts of
crusading. Frederick II was the grandson of Frederick I
and born King of Germany and Sicily in 1194. Deprived
of both parents at a very young age, he passed his youth
under the ostensible guardianship of Innocent III and
the regency or tutorage of various relatives; both lay
and ecclesiastical authorities recognized the value of
influencing such a fortuitously-positioned monarch. He

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124 | THE CRUSADES

was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Honorius HI
in 1220 after he vowed to go on crusade. His failure to
actually embark led many to blame him for the crusade’s
failure. Singularly unconcerned, in 1225 he married by
proxy Isabella II, heir to the crown of Jerusalem and
granddaughter of Isabella I of Jerusalem and Conrad
of Montferrat. Frederick II embarked on crusade in
1227, only to fall ill and return to Europe; this led Pope
Gregory IX to excommunicate him.

Frederick II sailed on crusade again in 1228. Distinctly
unamused that he was doing this while excommunicated,
Gregory IX excommunicated him again for good measure.
Thus twice excommunicated, Frederick negotiated with
the Ayyubid sultan, al-Kamil. Although the negotiation’s
outcome was not a Latin win—see the next chapter for
further details—it did achieve a bloodless restitution of
Jerusalem to Latin hands in less than a year. Isabella II
had died, and Frederick had himself crowned King of
Jerusalem before sailing back to Sicily, coolly displacing
his own infant son, who was technically the heir.

Frederick’s “success” on crusade was praised by a few
but viewed as a hostile act by the papacy and their lay allies
(Frederick’s enemies) at both ends of the Mediterranean.
Indeed, Gregory IX and Frederick’s father-in-law, John of
Brienne, launched crusades against Frederick’s lands in
Italy while he was still en route back to Sicily. The conflict
between the papacy and its allies against Frederick and his
allies would ebb and flow over the next several decades,
punctuated by excommunications, crusades, and treaties.
When Frederick II died in 1250, he had the upper hand
in this papal-imperial conflict, though that would not

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126 | THE CRUSADES

remain the case for his heirs. Ultimately the papacy and its
allies succeeded in killing off the men of the Hohenstaufen
family line in the second half of the thirteenth century.
Thus, we see in Frederick the overlap between lay and
ecclesiastical realms. His relationship with the papacy
as well as with other lay powers shifted back and forth
between alliance and enmity. While he undoubtedly
pursued his own interests on crusade, he also valued his
piety, or at least his pious reputation; he was reported
to have donned the robes of a Cistercian monk shortly
before his death.* We see also the complicated regional
dynamics at play, as Frederick ruled lands in northern
Europe, southern Europe, and (briefly) the eastern
Mediterranean. The family relationships linking various
political actors across generations are clear. Similarly
clear is the way in which crusading—whether against
Christians or non-Christians—functioned as a political
tool for popes and kings alike. Last but certainly not
least, in the story of Frederick II we see the many and
complex political interactions of the thirteenth-century
Mediterranean. It is to these interactions, and their
relationship with crusading, that we now turn.

24 David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 407.

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ALLIES & ADVERSARIES | 127

Further Reading

Abulafia, David. Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Brundage, James. Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

Bysted, Ane L. The Crusade Indulgence. Spiritual Rewards
and the Theology of the Crusades, c. 1095-1216.
Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Chazan, Robert. From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism:
Ancient and Medieval Christian Constructions of
Jewish History. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2016.

Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff. A History of Medieval Heresy
and Inquisition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
2011.

Geary, Patrick. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins
of Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2002.

Hodgson, Natasha, Katherine Lewis, and Matthew
Mesley, eds. Crusading and Masculinities. London
and New York: Routledge, forthcoming.

Kauper, Richard W. Medieval Chivalry. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Moore, John C. Pope Innocent II (1160/61-1216: To Root
up and to Plant. Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2009.

Paul, Nicholas L. To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades
and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages. Ithaca
NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

128 | THE CRUSADES

Siberry, Elizabeth. Criticism of Crusading 1095-1274.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Swanson, Robert N. Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.
1215-c. 1515. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.

Tolan, John V. Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European
Imagination. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002.

Vauchez, André. Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs
and Devotional Practices. Ed. Daniel E. Bornstein.
Trans. Margery J. Schneider. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1996.

Ward, Jennifer. Women in Medieval Europe 1200-1500.
2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Changing Circumstances:
Crusading in the
Thirteenth Century

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER DISCUSSED THE COMPLEX
ways in which crusading was part of broader trends
within Latin Christendom in the twelfth century, both
implicitly and explicitly linked to politics, devotion, the
arts, and social relationships. The reign of Frederick II
can serve as an example of these interconnections, and of
the way that crusading functioned as a contested field and
weapon among Latin Christian powers. But additionally,
Frederick’s reign encourages us to broaden our view still
further and examine crusading in light of the transcultural
connections of the thirteenth-century Mediterranean,
which was as dynamic and complex as ever.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

130 | THE CRUSADES

Admittedly crusading in the thirteenth century
continued a number of late twelfth-century trends. Latin
Christians continued to pursue crusading enthusiastically
on multiple fronts, including well outside the orbit of
Jerusalem. At the same time, crusades—especially in
the Mediterranean—were affected by the pressures and
opportunities raised by new actors in west Asia and
especially by intense competition for control of the eastern
Mediterranean. By the end of the thirteenth century,
the northwestern Mediterranean was _ increasingly
ruled by Latin Christian monarchs, while in the eastern
Mediterranean, the crusader states had disappeared.

Enthusiasm for crusading among Latin Christians
continued to be high and widespread in the thirteenth
century. This enthusiasm was particularly apparent at the
royal and noble end of the social spectrum. For example,
Louis IX of France descended from both maternal and
paternal crusading lineages. His piety led him to fiercely
pursue royal justice and good rule, the acquisition of holy
relics, the condemnation and burning of the Talmud in
Paris, and crusading. In his first major crusade—labelled
by nineteenth-century historians the Seventh Crusade
(1248-54)—Louis targeted Egypt. This expedition,
described accurately as “the most carefully prepared
and best-organized crusade of all,”* failed, and Louis
himself was taken prisoner. Days after giving birth, his

25 Riley-Smith, Crusades, 221.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES | 131

wife, Queen Margaret, led the defense of the port city
of Damietta before negotiating his release and an end
to hostilities with Shajar al-Durr, the female ruler of the
Mamluks at the time.

But thirteenth-century crusading wasn’t just about
monarchs and nobles. We also see crusading enthusiasm
at the other end of the social spectrum. At times this
was linked to class identities and tensions. For example,
Louis’s imprisonment sparked a movement of the poor
and middling, the so-called Crusade of the Shepherds.
Participants in this movement sought to place the blame
for the crusade’s failure and Louis’s capture on noble
shoulders.

As in the twelfth century, military leadership on
crusade was usually provided by both charismatic
monarchs and nobles or military orders—or both. At
the same time, the papacy continued to view itself as the
supreme leader of any crusade, despite various evidence
to the contrary. Louis’s expedition to Egypt, for example,
occurred while the papacy was itself preoccupied with
crusades against Frederick II and his kin; it was not the
weaker for it.

Above all, crusading continued to be a versatile
tool, easily wielded on multiple fronts and against a
variety of targets. The thirteenth century saw crusades
against political adversaries of the popes, crusades
against Christian “heretics,” crusades against pagans in
northern Europe, crusades in Iberia, and crusades in
the eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, crusading
continued to coexist alongside commerce, coexistence,
and other modes of warfare. These types of engagement,

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

132 | THE CRUSADES

too, were versatile tools, and as all concerned sought
their own advantages—whether political, spiritual, or
material—tools were swapped in and out depending upon
circumstances and personal priorities.

Most notably, the thirteenth century saw increasingly
successful crusading in Iberia and northern Europe and
Latin failure after failure in an ever more hotly contested
eastern Mediterranean. In some ways this too reflects
continuity from the twelfth century; for example, the
successes of the crusades of 1146-49 were in Iberia. But
at the same time, these thirteenth-century trends also
represent changing circumstances in all three regions:
northern Europe, Iberia, and the eastern Mediterranean.

As we saw, the first of the many “Baltic crusades” had
occurred in the mid-twelfth century and subsequently
crusading developed a unique character in northern
Europe. In the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
three related expansionist desires stimulated crusading in
northern Europe. First, missionary bishops in northern
Europe were frustrated by their failure to make as much
headway as they desired. Second, ambitious merchants in
northern towns and cities were well aware of the strategic
ports and natural resources on tap in pagan-held lands.
Third, the monarchs of Denmark and Sweden sought to
expand their realms.

The ostensible justification for fighting in the Baltics
was to defend fledgling churches and newly converted
Christians in the region. Baltic lands were deemed sacred,
pagans were decried as enemies of Christ, and familiar
crusading themes of defense and liberation were readily
adopted. Thus while Jerusalem was seen as Christ’s land,

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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134 | THE CRUSADES

the Baltic region was recast as belonging to his mother,
Mary. By the early thirteenth century, the papacy was
willing to grant the same indulgences to crusaders in
northern Europe as to those who fought elsewhere. By
the mid-thirteenth century, the papacy decided that
by virtue of fighting in Prussia one was a crusader and
would receive a crusader’s indulgence. Furthermore, the
papacy empowered others (like the Teutonic Knights)
to issue crusading indulgences in certain circumstances.
By the end of the thirteenth century, fighting on crusade
in northern Europe was represented as service to Mary,
represented as a goddess of war.

Thirteenth-century crusading in northern Europe
resulted in expansion, settlement, and colonization, as it
had elsewhere. Latin colonists settled in the conquered
areas, merchants were quick to establish trading outposts,
and bishops and monks were equally quick to colonize
and build for Christ. Military orders were given quasi-
independent status in certain regions, such as the Sword-
Brothers in Livonia and the Teutonic Order in Prussia.
Other conquered regions were simply claimed by the
monarchs of Denmark or Sweden as their own. Although
intra-Christian conflicts featured in northern Europe
crusading as elsewhere, these conflicts didn’t prove fatal;
Latin Christian expansion in northern Europe rolled on
as the thirteenth century came to a close.

The western Mediterranean was also in flux in the first
half of the thirteenth century. By the 1190s the Almohad
Caliphate seemed permanently ensconced in Iberia.
Alfonso VHI of Castile tried to advance in 1210, only to be
slapped back by the Almohads at Salvatierra. Nonetheless,

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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136 | THE CRUSADES

sensing opportunity, in 1212 Pope Innocent III announced
a new crusade in support of Alfonso VIII’s efforts. This
appeal was met with enthusiasm and crusaders led by
Alfonso won a surprise victory at the Battle of Las Navas
de Tolosa in July of the same year. In the years following,
crusading in Iberia would be alternately sanctioned by
an optimistic papacy or discouraged by popes worried
about losing resources for crusading in the eastern
Mediterranean.

Despite this papal ambivalence, Latin Christian
expansion in Iberia continued to gather steam in the
thirteenth century. Spurred not only by crusading ideas
and papal legitimation but also by political and economic
ambitions, and supported by regional Iberian military
orders as well as their own knights and mercenaries,
the rulers of Aragon and Castile continued to consume
Muslim-ruled areas whether or not a crusade had been
announced. By 1252, all but the southeastern corner
of the peninsula was under the control of one Latin
Christian ruler or another. Yet by 1252 that small corner
had been firmly buttressed by the Marinids, a new Sunni
dynasty that supplanted the Almohads. The line drawn
in 1252 between Latin Christian and Islamic rule in the
peninsula remained pretty firmly in place through the rest
of the century. At the same time, the connection between
crusading and proto-national identity in Latin Christian
Iberia, and the ambitions of the kingdoms of Aragon and
Castile in particular, grew ever more substantial.

Meanwhile, the eastern Mediterranean was undergoing
changes of its own. The creation of the crusader states
had altered the eastern Mediterranean in the early

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES | 137

twelfth century. In the early thirteenth century, the
Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 reoriented the
eastern Mediterranean yet again. In the aftermath of the
1204 conquest, the short-lived Latin Empire (1204-61)—
the Latin Occupation, from the Byzantine perspective—
was established. Spiritual and material riches flowed in a
mighty stream from Constantinople to western Europe,
especially to Venice.

Indeed, despite controlling less land area than before,
in the early thirteenth century Latin interests in the
eastern Mediterranean were doing well. This was in part
due to the diversity of lands and settlements either held
by Latins or friendly to their interests. Most of these small
polities were only loosely allied with each other, if that,
but a keen political eye would have seen the potential
for political unification. This was even more than usually
desirable, since Asiatic overland trade routes had shifted
slightly north, increasingly bypassing Egypt in favor of
cities farther north. As a mercantile force, Acre had begun
to seriously rival, if not surpass, Alexandria.

These economic and political opportunities in the early
thirteenth-century eastern Mediterranean helped drive
Frederick I’s interest in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. More
specifically, they inspired his interest in taking control of
Jerusalem without the disruption, destruction, and cost
of warfare. The fact that Frederick made his move in the
eastern Mediterranean while excommunicated ensured
the papacy’s enmity, since the popes, too, recognized
the opportunity at hand. They too could envision a Latin
Christian empire in the eastern Mediterranean that would
acknowledge papal supremacy and expand far beyond the

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

138 | THE CRUSADES

lands held by the current Latin Empire. Since Frederick II
was clearly uninterested in subordinating himself to the
papacy—and since he had his own territorial ambitions—
he and his allies and heirs became a crusading target, as
discussed. While Latin Christians responded to these
calls for crusade against Frederick, the church taxation
necessary to pay for them was unpopular, and some
monarchs—like Louis IX of France—remained committed
to crusading in the eastern Mediterranean.

Even so, that did not mean that volunteers eagerly lined
up to crusade in defense of the Latin Empire itself. Both
the leaders and finances of the Latin Empire were weak.
While this encouraged some knights and contingents
to step briskly towards Constantinople in the early
thirteenth century, enthusiasm for crusading in support
of the Latin Empire would not survive renewed threats to
Jerusalem. And as the Latin Empire teetered, Byzantine
leaders at the rival courts of Nicaea and Epiros began to
sketch out their claims to imperial title and rule, asserting
themselves firstly against the Latins and secondly against
each other.

It was the court of Nicaea that would eventually
restore the Byzantine Empire and establish the last
Byzantine imperial dynasty, the Palaiologoi. The driving
force behind Nicaean success was John III Vatatzes.
Between 1221 and 1254 John combined military acumen
and battlefield victories with other strengths: wealth
based on agricultural surplus and prudent financial
policies; a confident reassertion of traditional imperial
ideologies; and diplomatic dealings with all available
actors. In the end, however, one of his generals—Michael

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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Susanna A. Throop. The Crusade MP Ridin: ating, Hpir ge

Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

140 | THE CRUSADES

Palaiologos, henceforward Michael VIII—reconquered
Constantinople itself in 1261 and quickly established
treaties with Genoa in order to thwart their old mutual
enemy, Venice.

Notwithstanding this resurgent Byzantium, some
European rulers continued tosee an attractive opportunity
in both the prosperous eastern Mediterranean and the
papal assault on Frederick II. Louis IX’s younger brother,
Charles of Anjou, was both ambitious and capable. He
also welcomed collaboration with the papacy. As Charles
sought to expand his own power, he accepted a treaty with
Pope Urban IV in 1263 that gave him the crown of Sicily
in theory. In practice, Charles’s military conquest of the
island was only complete in 1269. In the 1260s and 1270s
Charles claimed overlordship of various Latin holdings
in the eastern Mediterranean, and prepared a military
assault on resurgent Byzantium, deliberately framing his
claims with the rhetoric and ideology of crusading.

Charles of Anjou was thus poised to consolidate
and reassert Latin power in the eastern Mediterranean
with papal support. He was, however, outmaneuvered
by adversaries to west and east. Byzantine emperor
Michael VIII deftly distanced Charles from the papacy
by making generous and immediate religious concessions
that brought together the Latin and Greek churches on
terms favorable to Rome. Charles’s campaign against
Byzantium may have been intended as a crusade, but
this new friendship between Rome and Constantinople
undercut those intentions decisively.

Charles also failed to reckon with discontent among
his subjects on Sicily, which was almost certainly directly

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES | 141

encouraged by both Michael VII and the monarchs of
Aragon: Constance, daughter of Frederick II, claimed
the Sicilian crown, while her husband, Peter III, was the
eldest son of the aggressive James I “the Conqueror” of
Aragon. In 1282, discontent in Sicily boiled into rebellion
against Angevin-French rule (and papal interference).
Once underway, the insurgence quickly escalated. Helped
along with Byzantine gold, the Aragonese took the island
of Sicily in the same year, and until 1302, wars (often
crusades) ground on over possession of Sicily. By then,
this mattered little to Charles of Anjou himself. In 1285 he
had died, having realized neither his own nor the papacy’s
dreams of empire in the eastern Mediterranean. In fact, six
short years later the last remaining piece of the crusader
states, the city of Acre, was no longer under Latin rule.

Why did crusading in the eastern Mediterranean
continue to meet with such resounding failure? The
problem was not a lack of enthusiasm for crusading, as
was once thought. Crusading as a cultural and religious
expression remained popular at all levels of society.
Logistics, taxation, and planning of crusades had all
improved. And while admittedly crusades within
Europe—against adversaries of the papacy, against
“heretics”—required funds and manpower, it is hard to
argue that this fatally underequipped crusading in the
eastern Mediterranean. After all, Louis’s crusading in
the 1240s and 1250s had been spectacularly well planned
and equipped, and nonetheless unraveled. To understand
the Latin loss of Acre in 1291, we need to look to other
factors, most importantly the emergence and success of
the Mamluk Dynasty in the later thirteenth century.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

142 | THE CRUSADES

After Salah al-Din’s death in 1193, the lands he had
conquered did not function as a unified whole. Various
regions were governed by various members of Salah al-
Din’s family, the Ayyubids, with the strongest individual at
any given time acclaimed as sultan and Egypt recognized
as the heart of Ayyubid domains. The Ayyubids’ primary
concern was not to further eat away at the weakened
crusader states, but rather, to successfully defeat rivals
within the family and to ensure that no further expeditions
from Latin Christendom arrived to disrupt the status
quo.” The latter was a real threat. The crusade of 1213-21
was very nearly a catastrophe for the Ayyubids, but they
rallied and unified to deal with the threat, and—helped
by the Nile, whose flooding managed to surprise to the
crusaders—they emerged relatively unscathed.

Freed from that external threat, in the 1220s prominent
Ayyubids returned to jockeying for power amongst
themselves. In doing so they made use of both military
might and diplomacy, as had Zangi, Nur ad-Din, and
Salah al-Din. Also like their predecessors, the Ayyubids
found helpful leverage in alliances with various Christian
powers. But whereas in the twelfth century Muslim rulers
primarily allied themselves with the Byzantine Empire or
a crusader state, in the thirteenth century the strongest
potential Christian allies were located further west. And
while European rulers did not particularly incline to such
alliances in the twelfth century, in the thirteenth century
some saw the possible advantages. Furthermore, some
Europeans recognized the contests for power within the

26 Cobb, Race for Paradise, 204.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES | 143

Ayyubid world and were willing to directly engage in
these contests to advance their own individual causes.

A few examples can help bring these points to
life. First, in the 1220s, al-Kamil, the Ayyubid sultan
based in Cairo, worried about the threat posed by his
brother who was based at Damascus. Al-Kamil turned
to Frederick II as a potential ally, offering alliance on
generous terms. Frederick I, in need of allies himself,
accepted. This diplomacy paved the way for Frederick’s
non-violent crusade. But by the time Frederick arrived
in Jerusalem to affirm the precise terms of the treaty,
things had changed. The brother had died and al-Kamil’s
position was much stronger, while papal opposition had
weakened Frederick’s position. Al-Kamil thus negotiated
an alliance that was a clear win for him and the Ayyubids,
though admittedly the popular response to the treaty was
overwhelmingly negative.

The reign of al-Kamil’s heir followed a similar pattern
and confirms the same larger points. By 1234 Pope
Gregory IX could see the end of Frederick II and al-
Kamil’s treaty on the horizon and preemptively issued a
call for a crusade; enthusiastic crusaders arrived in the
eastern Mediterranean in 1239 and 1240. Meanwhile, in
1238 al-Kamil had died, and had been succeeded as sultan
by his son, al-Salih Ayyub. Al-Salih Ayyub’s most serious
rival was his uncle, the lord of Damascus.

Thus once again Cairo and Damascus faced off against
each other, and again European allies proved pivotal.
The lord of Damascus was the first to turn to European
allies for support, offering back substantial lands in the
eastern Mediterranean, including Jerusalem. But al-Salih

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144 | THE CRUSADES

Ayyub was not idle. As sultan, he had amassed armies
through two traditional means: a corps of mamluk
(“slave”) soldiers, and nomadic allies. Additionally, he
ensured the support of a Turkic people from central Asia
who had been pushed westwards—the Khwarazmians.
The Khwarazmians proved committed associates. They
plowed through Palestine in 1244, taking Jerusalem.
The contest between al-Salih Ayyub and his uncle came
to a head later that year, when al-Salih Ayyub and the
Khwarazmians trounced his uncle and allies. This defeat,
combined with accounts of the Khwarismian conquest of
Jerusalem, may have helped prompt Louis IX’s crusade
in the late 1240s. It also meant European attention was
firmly focused on Jerusalem, which helped the Byzantines
retake Constantinople, as already described.

Louis’s crusade, in turn, affected the creation of a new
Islamic power in the eastern Mediterranean. Sultan al-
Salih Ayyub died in 1249. While his heir returned to Egypt
from Mesopotamia, his wife, Shajar al-Durr, effectively
governed, colluding with chief ministers and generals to
hide the sultan’s death. Shajar al-Durr and the aforesaid
generals and ministers had mopped up the crusade by
the time the formal heir—Turanshah—arrived to accept
Louis’s surrender and take power. The Egyptian Ayyubids
were not impressed when Turanshah’s first move was
to try to remove them and put his own subordinates
into power, and Turanshah was killed in 1250. Shajar
al-Durr herself emerged relatively victorious from the
whole sequence of events. She ruled in her own name for
three months and then married and grudgingly shared
(some) power with her husband, the commander Aybak.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES | 145

Thus began what historians call the Mamluk Dynasty or
Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517).

It’s worth pausing here to underline what this
sequence of events has demonstrated. At the same time
as ambitious popes and European princes were eyeing up
the possibility of empire in the eastern Mediterranean,
Islamicate polities in the region were in flux. Ambitious
Europeans and rivalrous Ayyubids allied and fought with
each other. Both diplomatic and military interactions had
a wide range of effects around the Mediterranean, not
least helping enable the Byzantine Empire’s restoration
and the rise of the Mamluk Dynasty. The Mediterranean
remained complex, dynamic, and subject to change.

Indeed, what ultimately cemented Mamluk rule was
the way they handled the newest presence in west Asia:
the Mongols. The Mongols were a nomadic, horse-riding
people from central Asia. Driven by the ambitions of their
leader Chinggis (Genghis) Khan and fueled by a pressing
need for grass thanks to a changing climate, they expanded
westwards and eastwards. The resulting Mongol Empire
(1206-94) was the largest contiguous land empire in
human history, with unprecedented impacts on the entire
eastern hemisphere. Both the destruction and terror of
their expansion and the opportunities and prosperity of
their heyday, sometimes referred to as the Pax Mongolica,
reshaped the eastern hemisphere.

Latin Christians in Europe and the crusader states
responded to the Mongols alternately with hope and fear.
Perhaps the Mongols were Christians, or perhaps they
were pagans who could be converted. If so—or perhaps,
even if not—they might be allies against Islamic powers.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

146 | THE CRUSADES

At the same time, when the Mongols posed a clear threat
to Latin Christendom, crusades were launched against
them.

For their part, the “Islamic powers” in the 1250s were
dangerously divided until the Mongol threat afforded
an opportunity for the Mamluk Dynasty to cement
its rule. The Mamluks who had first taken power in
1250 found themselves shoved to west Asia where they
rubbed shoulders with a few remaining Ayyubids. The
Mongol advance, however, helped elevate three leaders:
the Ayyubid prince of Damascus, his chief commander,
Baybars, and the Mamluk amir Qutuz in Cairo. The
Mongols took Baghdad in 1258, formally ending the by-
then figurehead ‘Abbasid caliphate. Both Damascus and
its prince fell in 1260. Recognizing the peril, Baybars and
Qutuz led a combined force in military jihad against the
Mongols and the Mongols’ various Christian and Muslim
allies—and won. Once Baybars and others subsequently
killed Qutuz, a rough consensus elevated Baybars to the
role of sultan at the head of a powerful and now unified
Mamluk force. The Mamluk Sultanate had survived.

For the crusader states, this meant they had, at best,
moved from the frying pan to the fire. As described
earlier in this chapter, they had been in a relatively strong
economic position at the start of the thirteenth century,
but constitutional crises had led to factional infighting
and civil war in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. These conflicts
were the backdrop to Frederick II’s claim to the crown
of Jerusalem in the 1220s and Charles of Anjou’s outright
purchase of the crown in 1277; of course, both times, the
city and throne of Jerusalem were not actually under Latin

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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148 | THE CRUSADES

Christian control. But it was not only political position and
power that were contested. The Italian city-states had also
ramped up their rivalries, each seeking primary claim to
trade wealth from port cities like Acre and Tripoli. All the
while, this wealth began to diminish in the later thirteenth
century, as trade routes shifted yet again in the aftermath
of the Mongol conquests, further north towards the Black
Sea. When the Mongols showed up on the shores of the
eastern Mediterranean, the situation fractured further, as
some Christians and Muslims in the region eyed up the
odds and allied with the Mongols.

Unfortunately forthe crusader states, once Baybars had
secured his base of power in Cairo and Egypt, he decided
that the best way to consolidate and enrich his position
was to control the eastern Mediterranean. For Baybars, as
it had for Zangi, Nur ad-Din, and Salah al-Din, this meant
dealing with both Muslim and Christian adversaries once
and for all. The fact of the matter was, however, that
Baybars had already mostly crushed Muslim opposition,
and so he focused predominantly on conquering the
crusader states. This would have the additional benefit of
underscoring his legitimacy as a mujahid and pious ruler.

Baybars was successful through a combination of
diplomacy and military force. Diplomacy helped ensure
Latin polities in the eastern Mediterranean remained
isolated. He formed alliances with Charles of Anjou, the
newly reinstated Byzantine emperors, and the city-state
of Genoa in the 1260s. At the same time as he campaigned
against one crusader state he skillfully negotiated with
another. Thus he divided and conquered. By the time of his
death, only Tripoliand Acre remained—nominally—under

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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150 | THE CRUSADES

Latin rule. Baybars’s successors used similar tactics to take
Tripoli in 1289 (ironically at the request of the Venetians
in the city) and Acre in 1291, six years after the death of
Charles of Anjou. This was the nail in the coffin of any
imagined Latin Empire in the Mediterranean.

The reason for continuing crusading failures in the
eastern Mediterranean thus rests in a combination of
factors: shifting trade routes; economic and _ political
rivalries within Latin Christendom; and the presence of
new powers like the Mongols, Mamluks, and resurgent
Byzantines. We also have to recognize the importance of
the eastern Mediterranean in the eastern hemisphere as a
whole. It was and had been such contested territory not
only because of its religious importance but also because
of its role in Afro-Eurasian trade and west Asian politics.

It may seem accurate to paint the 1291 loss of Acre in
melodramatic and tragic tones. In such a picture, by the
late thirteenth century crusading had become nothing
more than another form of international relations,
composed of warfare and diplomacy as seemed best at
any given time, without the “pure” religious zeal and
unified endeavor of earlier, “real” crusades. In this picture,
“corruption” of the crusade ideal left Latin Christendom
divided and ineffective, doomed to failure, unable to
claim the spiritual prize of Jerusalem.

However, in addition to problematically praising
and glorifying “pure” holy war, such a picture vastly and
inaccurately simplifies crusading history. When we look
at crusading in the late thirteenth century, we do not see a
drop in crusade enthusiasm or piety among participants.
Indeed, we continue to see the deliberate construction

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES | 151

of crusading as a devotional undertaking and route to
salvation. Furthermore, if we look honestly at the First
Crusade and crusading in the twelfth century, we don’t
see many more signs of actual Christian unity or “pure”
intentions in the events themselves. The crusader states
formed in the plural because of disunity and rivalry
among their founders; Urban II appealed to nobles rather
than monarchs in part because of ongoing papal-imperial
conflict; Alexios I Komnenos and the Normans fought
each other directly before and directly after the First
Crusade.

Furthermore, contrary to any imagined tragic
narrative, crusading did not end in 1291. Not even Latin
Christian political presence in the eastern Mediterranean
ended in 1291, since the Kingdom of Cyprus remained
strong. Indeed, as the next chapter shows, crusading
itself would continue to be enthusiastically pursued and
promoted within Latin Christendom and at its frontiers
even when faced with environmental change, the
Hundred Years’ War, and a hemispheric pandemic.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

152 | THE CRUSADES

Further Reading

Amitai-Preiss, Reuven. Mongols and Mamluks: The
Mamluk-Ilkhanid War, 1260-1281. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Backman, Clifford R. The Decline and Fall of Medieval
Sicily: Politics, Religion, and Economy in the Reign of
Frederick II, 1296-1337. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.

Christiansen, Eric. The Northern Crusades. 2nd ed. New
York: Penguin, 1998.

Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia. The Making of Saint Louis:
Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Later Middle
Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.

Epstein, Steven A. An Economic and Social History of
Later Medieval Europe, 1000-1500. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Fancy, Hussein. The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty,
Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of
Aragon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2016.

Housley, Norman. The Later Crusades, 1274-1580: From
Lyons to Alcazar. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992.

Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the Islamic World: From
Conquest to Conversion. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2017.

Morgan, David. The Mongols. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2007.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Towards Christian
Nationalism:
Crusading into the
Early Modern Period

AS THE LAST CHAPTER SHOWCASED, THROUGHOUT THE
thirteenth century, the Mediterranean was a dynamic and
contested space, and crusading continued to be one of the
ways in which Latin Christians engaged in it. In terms of
where crusades were waged, where they were successful,
and the enthusiasm with which they were pursued,
crusading continued along well-worn paths. Even so, two
factors distinguished thirteenth-century crusading. First,
it was ever more closely aligned with nascent national
identities, and second, it was more deliberately connected
to political disputes in the Islamicate world. Circa 1300,

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

154 | THE CRUSADES

a Latin Christian presence remained in the eastern
Mediterranean and would grow; crusading was rolling on
in northern Europe; and enthusiasm for crusading was
high.

In fact, as this chapter shows, as both a cultural
phenomenon and as a mode of warfare, crusading
continued to thrive and exert influence in the later
Middle Ages and early modern period—notwithstanding
the pressures of environmental change, a hemispheric
pandemic, the Hundred Years’ War, and religious
upheavals within Latin Christendom. Crusading also
continued to evolve to suit the times. It found stimulus in
not only the successes of the Mamluks and the Mongols,
the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and the emergence of
an aggressive Lithuanian nation, but also intra-Christian
conflicts, the rise of new Christian “heresies,” and the
expansion of European empires in the Americas. In some
regions, crusading ideas and practices played key roles in
early modern nation-building.

The period from roughly 1300 to 1600 witnessed
profound changes in European, Mediterranean, and
world history. Within Europe, the series of conflicts
known as the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) shifted
the way war was waged—towards professionalization and
standing armies—and reinforced the emergence of the
early modern nations of England and France. Meanwhile,
the Avignon Papacy (1309-78) and the Great (Western)
Schism (1378-1417) aroused discontent with the way the

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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TOWARDS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM | 155

Latin church was carrying out its mission, a discontent
that at times deteriorated into division. Centuries later,
the Protestant Reformations and wars of religion of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also expressed
religious discontent and division. These developments
affected and were affected by the growth of political
ideologies and cultural trends that emphasized the value
and potential of humanity, and the supremacy of lay
monarchs over the church.

All of the above phenomena were also linked to
broader disruptions in the eastern hemisphere. The
MCA (Medieval Climatic Anomaly) that had so boosted
European prosperity starting in the tenth century finally
wound down in the later thirteenth century, ushering
in centuries of cooler temperatures in western Europe
that are sometimes referred to as the Little Ice Age.
The cooling may have seemed gradual at first, but it hit
Europeans hard in the early fourteenth century. Six years
of cold and incredibly rainy weather between 1315 and
1321 led to widespread flooding and famine so severe it
is still known in European history as the Great Famine.
At almost exactly the same time, between 1314 and 1321,
a cattle plague swept Europe, killing livestock already
weakened by cold, floods, and insufficient grain. Like
grim icing on a terrifying cake, the hemispheric pandemic
commonly known as the Black Death swept Afro-Eurasia
from 1346 to 1353. It was followed by repeated episodes
of plague through the fourteenth century in western
Europe and through the early modern period in the
eastern Mediterranean.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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156 | THE CRUSADES

To say there was a lot going on would be an
understatement, and one might think that crusading
would fade away in the face of it all, or at least take a back
seat. The opposite is true. Crusading continued to be
supported by popular culture and social habits at all levels
of European society, both with and without “official”
encouragement and sanction from popes or monarchs.
Even between 1345 and 1347—at the start of the Black
Death and a decade into the Hundred Years’ War—a
crusade led by the Venetians sailed to defend Smyrna.
The Black Death itself, which caused population levels in
western Europe to drop so low they didn’t recover until
the sixteenth century, led to a crusading hiatus of a mere
decade. In 1359 crusade preaching and fighting resumed
in earnest, fired by the passionately committed Peter I of
Cyprus and his allies.

Why did crusading continue to thrive? The first part
of the answer lies in the purportedly defensive stance of
crusading: “crusading thrived on disasters.””’ Perhaps it
is more accurate to say that crusading thrived one way or
another, since disasters and perceived threats provided
a reason to rally while successes provided a reason to
continue. In any event, in the later Middle Ages there
were a number of perceived threats, both new and newly
resurgent. In the eastern Mediterranean, the Mongols,
Mamluks, and Ottomans were successive crusading
targets, while the assertive and newly organized nation of
Lithuania and the solidly entrenched Kingdom of Granada
provided foci for crusading in northern Europe and Iberia

27 Riley-Smith, Crusades, 295.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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158 | THE CRUSADES

respectively. Crusading within Latin Christendom also
continued to be popular, whether against opponents of
the papacy or against new “heresies.”

The second part of the answer rests in the continuing
appeal of the central ideological themes of crusading: the
desire for spiritual benefits and salvation; the desire to
expand Christendom and convert or eliminate perceived
threats to it, both internal and external; and the desire
to control lands deemed holy. Belief in the power and
righteousness of sanctified violence undergirded these
desires. Crusading also continued to draw strength from
key cultural patterns: devotional practices, chivalry,
family traditions. All these themes and patterns continued
to prove adaptable and appealing to many different kinds
of people. Crusading could be as useful to groups trying
to enact social change from below as to powers trying to
direct change from above or defend the status quo.

At the same time, crusading did not continue exactly
as it had been. We can identify changes in both crusading
ideas and practices in the late medieval and early modern
period. First, crusading ideas were integrated with
the ideals of late medieval humanism to produce what
has been called “Renaissance crusading.”** From this
perspective, older themes like Christian unity and the
defense and liberation of Christendom were joined by
renewed calls for civic, educated, and rational action.
Indeed, some of the key figures in the Renaissance—such
as Petrarch—were crusade enthusiasts. For some, the

28 Norman Housley, The Later Crusades, 1274-1580: From
Lyons to Alcazar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

TOWARDS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM | 159

quest to reconnect with antiquity (and disconnect with
the Middle Ages) was fueled by a desire to disavow any
common intellectual heritage with the Islamicate world.
Second, people transferred crusading ideas more and
more to national identities and conflicts. Of course, this
was not an entirely new phenomenon. After all, Urban II
had deliberately appealed to the Franks and their sense of
Frankish identity when he preached in 1095; crusaders in
1188 wore different colored crosses to indicate English,
Frankish, or Flemish identity; rulers had deliberately
pursued crusading alongside territorial expansion and
political aggrandizement in Iberia, northern Europe, and
the eastern Mediterranean. But in the later Middle Ages,
as European monarchs strengthened their positions and
increasingly claimed to rule over distinct nations, the
connection intensified. At the risk of oversimplifying
a complicated relationship, whereas in the twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries we might describe crusades as
Latin Christian holy wars with national inflections, by the
sixteenth century we might describe crusades as national
holy wars rooted in a Latin Christian tradition.
Strengthened ideological connections between states,
nationhood, and crusading could be seen in crusading
practices, too. First, in this later period we see the
emergence of order-states: political entities governed
by military orders. These polities were Latin Christian
theocracies in which a small elite, composed of fighting
men from outside the region in question, governed a
larger subject population. Second, we see the creation
of crusade leagues: temporary alliances of nations
committed to this or that crusading endeavor. No longer

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

160 | THE CRUSADES

were crusades even nominally supranational; instead,
they were an explicit expression of relations between
nations.

In the early years of the fourteenth century, Latin
Christians expressed dismay at the Mamluk conquest of
Acre in 1291. Criticism centered on the multinational
military orders. These orders were supposed to be
dedicated to the maintenance, defense, and expansion
of Christendom. They had become powerful and
wealthy. Yet they seemed to have failed stupendously. As
theoreticians tried to plan for a more successful crusading
future, they envisioned uniting all military orders into
one “super-order” led by a new warrior king of Jerusalem.
While criticism of the pan-Mediterranean military orders
was widespread, the Templars bore the brunt of it: the
order was accused of heresy and ultimately suppressed,
its assets dispersed.

The dissolution of the Templars in 1312 was not a sign
of diminished crusading enthusiasm. On the contrary,
the 1320s and early 1330s witnessed a strong revival of
crusading enthusiasm across Europe. Philip IV of France
was devoted to the legacy of crusading associated with his
royal family, the Capetians, as well as with the family of his
wife, Joan of Navarre, who was Philip’s queen consort, the
reigning queen of Navarre, and the reigning countess of
Champagne. Philip made a sustained effort—using pomp,
pageantry, propaganda, and thus significant funds—to
rally both the French and the English for a crusade to the

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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TOWARDS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM | 161

eastern Mediterranean. Yet he also brought charges against
the Templars and successfully outfaced the papacy in the
latest round of papal-regnal conflict in the early 1300s.
The same monarch could pursue open conflict with the
papacy and a major military order while simultaneously
expressing substantial crusading fervor because both the
conflict and the fervor could be, and were, represented
as a concern for Christian piety. Thus it is perhaps not
so surprising that other military orders, in particular
the Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, survived. They
did so in part by establishing their usefulness, affirming
their dual commitment to warfare and charitable works,
and ensuring their political independence by establishing
order-states.

The Teutonic Knights established semi-sovereign
order-states in Prussia and Livonia and continued to
successfully lead crusading in the Baltics. Recruitment of
knights from elsewhere in Europe to fight on winter or
summer campaigns was bolstered by the emergence of two
new pagan enemies: the Mongols, and the Lithuanians,
who had been unified by a confident and expansionist
leader in the mid-thirteenth century. The chivalric
accoutrements increasingly provided by the order also
helped with recruitment. Participants in campaigns were
honored in various ways. They could leave painted shields
hanging in an order fortress, were ceremonially feasted,
and on at least one occasion were presented with badges
inscribed “honor conquers all.””? Indeed, crusading in
northern Europe only began petering out in the early

29 Riley-Smith, Crusades, 284.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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162 | THE CRUSADES

fifteenth century, when it was undone by its own success
in eliminating or converting its targets.

In the meantime, the Hospitallers had also established
an order-state in the early 1300s, in their case on the island
of Rhodes. They conquered Rhodes in 1309 and by the
early 1320s their increased landholdings and possession
of former Templar assets enabled them to maintain an
active military role in the eastern Mediterranean. Rhodes
itself—located on key maritime trade routes with a Greek-
speaking populace—became a destination for a small
number of European colonists. The Hospitallers fortified
Rhodes extensively and by the early fifteenth century, the
island was a vital entrepot for both merchants and pilgrims
in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, its navy played a major
role in Mediterranean crusading.

Eastern Mediterranean crusading in the fourteenth
century pursued two related goals: defeating (or at least
countering) the Mamluks and reestablishing a Latin
Kingdom of Jerusalem. Leadership for these crusades
was provided by a variety of lay powers, the Hospitallers,
and the papacy. The monarchs of France and England
and the Italian city-states and kingdoms were particularly
enthusiastic in the promotion of crusading. So too was
Peter I of Cyprus, who, as noted, reignited hopes for a
major expedition to take Jerusalem in the very immediate
aftermath of the Black Death. Various configurations of
these leaders formed and reformed as crusade leagues,
ie., allied states devoted to a specific crusading endeavor.

Despite the time, energy, and resources thrown
at eastern Mediterranean crusading in the fourteenth
century, and despite temporary triumphs here and

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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TOWARDS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM | 163

there, from a Latin Christian perspective it continued to
be unsuccessful. As should sound familiar at this point,
its failure can be traced to intra-Christian conflict and
the military superiority of the Mamluks, as well as less
predictable factors like a changing climate and plague.
Furthermore, all parties in the eastern Mediterranean
continued to be as frequently united as divided by
economic interests. At times shared interests took
prominence and calmed the waters for decades at a time,
sometimes promoting Christian-Muslim alliances. For
example, by 1490 the Kingdom of Cyprus had come to
rest in the hands of the Venetians with the approval of
the Mamluk sultan. He had recognized that his interests
aligned with Venice much more closely than they did with
the previous Frankish rulers of Cyprus, who had allowed
their ports to become havens for pirates. As had always
been the case, religious identity was only one factor
among many.

Unsurprisingly, then, crusading by Latin Christians
against Latin Christians also persisted in the fourteenth
century. The papacy remained concerned about the
conflict ofinterest between themselves and various rulers.
Not even the fourteenth-century removal of the papacy
and papal curia to Avignon in France—known as the
Avignon Papacy—ended these crusades within western
Europe. On the contrary, the perceived vulnerability of
and threats to the papacy further motivated popes to
use crusading against their adversaries. The same would
prove true when the Latin Church was divided by the
Great (Western) Schism from 1378-1417.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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164 | THE CRUSADES

You might think that all this crusading would have used
up even the most widespread enthusiasm, but crusading
in Iberia continued to attract devotees in the fourteenth
century. Not much headway was made by Latin Christian
rulers in Iberia, though it appeared that might change in
the middle of the century. In 1340 the Marinids began to
actively move troops across from north Africa to assail
Latin Christian targets. Alfonso XI of Castile, who was
quite militarily adept, managed to counter the Marinids’
moves, igniting support within Europe more broadly. But
in the end, the Marinids were deprived of their adversary
by the Black Death; Alfonso died of plague while besieging
Granada in 1350. The Kingdom of Granada would remain
firmly installed for another hundred years or so.

In the meantime, Latin Christian ambitions in Iberia
turned, or rather returned, towards Africa. North Africa
was both strategically and economically important, both
in and of itself and as a route to the wealthy and globally
interconnected societies of both west and east Africa. As
a result, the region had long been coveted by European
powers who had planned and at times executed various
crusades against Islamicate powers in the region. With the
stalemate over Granada, Peter I of Castile proposed to act
on those intentions in 1354. Four decades later, in 1390,
crusading in north Africa—in this case, against Mahdia
in what is now Tunisia—would prove alluring enough
to transcend the Great (Western) Schism and generate a
multinational force.

In the early fifteenth century, two factors drove even
greater crusade enthusiasm in Latin Christendom: the
end of the Great (Western) Schism in 1417, which seemed

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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166 | THE CRUSADES

to signal the restoration of Latin Christian unity, and the
increasingly undeniable strength of the Ottoman Turks.
Yet this heightened enthusiasm was not at first directed
towards the Ottomans. Instead, it was channeled into “the
last great series of crusades against heretics,”*’ the five
Hussite crusades in Bohemia (ca. 1419 to 1434). The very
same ecclesiastical council resolved the Great (Western)
Schism and condemned Jan Hus to be burned at the
stake for heresy. But the Hussite “heresy” itself, which
condemned church corruption and argued forcefully for
church and social reform (as many purported heresies did),
continued to thrive even after Hus’s death. In particular,
its continued dominance in the Kingdom of Bohemia was
fueled by connections between the “heretics’” religious
beliefs and Czech nationalist sentiments. In 1419, Holy
Roman Emperor-elect Sigismund of Luxemburg, one
of the individuals who had helped condemn Jan Hus,
inherited the right to the throne of Bohemia. Much to his
chagrin, he was not welcomed by those who viewed him
as a traitor to both Hus and the Czech people. With the
support of the papacy, Sigismund and his allies began “the
most futile”*’ and ineffective Hussite crusades.

From a historian’s perspective, the Hussite crusades
echoed certain aspects of earlier crusades against heretics
like the Albigensian Crusades. In particular, they recalled
the way that royal and papal power had combined to
combat unorthodox religious beliefs that threatened
the religio-political status quo, and the way that local

30 Riley-Smith, Crusades, 306.
31 Riley-Smith, Crusades, 307.

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TOWARDS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM | 167

communities could and did effectively fight back against
encroachment that they perceived as territorial and
opportunistic. In addition, though, the Hussite crusades
point us forwards towards sixteenth-century crusading.
As Christopher Tyerman has underscored, the Hussites’
“mixture of political, social and religious rebellion forged
a potent threat.”** Crusading could be a way for the lowest
social classes to rebel against the powerful and the status
quo, as seen before with the Crusade of the Shepherds in
France (1251) and later with the Pilgrimage of Grace in
England (1536). Nonetheless, to many Latin Christians in
the early fifteenth century, the Hussite crusades began to
look like a dangerous diversion from a far bigger threat:
the Ottomans.

If we remain at a historical distance, the story of the
Ottomans resembles the story of the Saljuqs: a story of
an originally mobile Turkic people, led by a series of
charismatic and effective leaders, who thought and fought
their way to territorially-bound imperial greatness in west
Asia, one of the eastern hemisphere’s key crossroads.
Purportedly inspired by a divine vision, Osman and his
successors first solidified their position in Anatolia in the
early fourteenth century. Their neighbor, the resurgent
Byzantine Empire, was troubled by persistent conflicts
over the imperial throne, and Osman’s heirs rightly
sensed opportunity. They offered their support as reliable
and effective mercenary troops to this or that Byzantine
contender. At the time, there were also larger conflicts
taking shape in the Mediterranean. Around the middle of

32 Tyerman, God’s War, 902.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

168 | THE CRUSADES

the fourteenth century—in the midst of the Black Death—
the Byzantines became embroiled in the Venetian-
Genoese War (1350-55). Here, too, the Ottomans played
a role; they allied with Genoa against Byzantium and
Venice. Thus through a combination of diplomacy and
military skill the Ottomans expanded their own holdings
in the northeastern Mediterranean, steadily moving the
boundary of their lands westward into the Balkans.

The Ottomans’ westward moves were eventually
viewed with alarm by Latin Christians in the second half
of the fourteenth century. Opposition was led by the
self-proclaimed power in the Balkans, the Kingdom of
Hungary. Yet Ottoman expansion was, in fact, halted by
an ambitious Muslim leader: Timur (known in European
sources as Timur the Lame or Tamerlane). Timur’s
outwardly spiraling series of conquests in central Asia
eventually led to assaults on both Ottoman and Mamluk
towns in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
It would not be until the mid-fifteenth century that the
Ottomans again unified under one ruler (Murad II,
r. 1421-44 and 1446-51), consolidating their holdings in
Anatolia and hungering for further expansion.

Murad II, like so many other rulers we’ve looked at,
operated through a combination of diplomacy (including
marriage) and force. He also recognized that his human
obstacles were diverse: other Islamicate powers, such
as the Mamluks; the Byzantine Empire; and various
European powers, notably Hungary and Venice, who
were most active and ambitious in the northeastern
Mediterranean. Under Murad’s rule, the Ottomans
successfully held off—arguably, defeated—the Hungarians

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

:
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:
S

EYarp,

Susanna A. Throop. The crusade W, Peter Qeeomnan tnebine, d20S:Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

170 | THE CRUSADES

and their allies, despite the crusading enthusiasm that
swelled the Hungarians’ ranks.

With Hungary and Venice firmly held at arms’ length,
Murad’s heir, Mehmed II, turned to tackle the Byzantine
Empire, conquering Constantinople in 1453 with a
notable combination of military strategy and technology.
Mehmed’s great-grandson, Selim, would in turn mop up
the Mamluks, taking Cairo in 1517. Hospitaller Rhodes fell
to the Ottomans in 1522—and still, Ottoman expansion
into eastern Europe, west Asia, and Africa continued.
By 1566, the Ottoman Empire sprawled across three
continents, blanketing the crucial trade routes connecting
Europe, east Africa, and west Asia. The empire would
only come to an end in the early 1920s.

Ottoman successes in the fifteenth century prompted
waves of crusade enthusiasm in Latin Christendom,
especially after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople
in 1453. Expeditions were planned and attracted not only
the rich and powerful but also the poor. Few actually set out
and virtually all faced the same old challenges: inadequate
unification, underestimation and/or misunderstanding of
the enemy’s situation, and insufficient military strength.
The lack of crusade success in the fifteenth century used
to be read as a lack of interest in crusading, but in fact,
crusading enthusiasm was being harnessed in European
national interests like never before, and this, too, was part
of the reason for crusading failure against the Ottomans.

The gold standard example of this was in the Iberian
peninsula. After smoldering for nearly a century,
crusading in Iberia flamed high when the kingdoms
of Aragon and Castile were joined by the marriage of

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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TOWARDS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM | 171

Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile in 1479.
Led by the capable and ambitious Isabella, the now-
united Spanish threw themselves (and all the help they
could recruit from the rest of Latin Christendom) against
the Kingdom of Granada. Undermined by its own internal
disputes and overwhelmed by the Spanish onslaught,
Granada surrendered in 1492.

As noted, crusading was driven by success as well
as failure, and thus the successful conquest of Granada
inspired an invasion of Africa starting in 1497. In this,
the Spanish were not innovating, but rather following
the example of Portugal, which had been crusading in
north Africa since the early fifteenth century. The Spanish
turned also to the lands that would become known to
Europeans as the Americas. Isabella and Ferdinand
sponsored Christopher Columbus, a crusade enthusiast
who wrote that his “successes” in the western hemisphere
were consolation for the “matter of the Holy Sepulchre.”*?

The efforts in Africa, in particular, were crusades,
but they were national crusades—they were framed in
terms of Spanish national identity, national sponsorship,
national gain, national expansion, at the same time as they
continued to refer to Christendom’s gain and expansion.
They were supported by national military orders, which
were subject to national rather than papal authority. To
be most accurate, we should say that this was Christian
nationalism, informed by a crusading past and continuing
to fuel territorial expansion in the early modern era.

33 Tyerman, God’s War, 914.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

172 | THE CRUSADES

It also fueled both local and national expulsions of Jews
and Muslims throughout the Latin-ruled Mediterranean.
The period from the twelfth century onwards had
witnessed a crescendo of forcible expulsions and other
forms of persecution, including, in 1516, the creation of
the first Jewish ghetto in Venice. The same period saw
the enslavement and expulsion of Muslim individuals
and communities from Iberia and Italy. For those able to
migrate, the Ottoman Empire became a refuge.

The other reason why crusading against the Ottomans
was never successful is that the situation was always
complex. As before, relationships in the Mediterranean
could not be reductively characterized as “us vs. them.”
The Ottomans were Muslim, and they had conquered
“Christian” lands, but they were also in control of key
trade routes, which were used by European merchants
(who contributed to the prosperity of their own locales).
Furthermore, Ottoman rulers were intellectual, artistic,
wealthy, interested in the transcultural exchange of ideas
and goods, and relatively tolerant of their Jewish and
Christian subjects. Not simply competitors or enemies,
for many Latins engaged in the Mediterranean world,
the Ottomans were resources, patrons, and allies. The
precedent of military alliances between the Ottomans
and Latin Christian powers had been set as early as the
fourteenth century, as noted, and was cemented in place
in the fifteenth century. Indeed, for some contemporary
observers outside the Ottoman Empire (and certainly for

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

TOWARDS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM | 173

many within its boundaries), the Ottomans had “inherited
Roman universal sovereignty.”

In the early sixteenth century, outward-facing
crusading continued in north Africa, on the frontiers of
Hungary, and in the eastern Mediterranean. Crusading
thus continued to be a multi-front phenomenon. On all
three fronts, crusading enthusiasm fused with national
interests to prompt wars driven by explicitly Christian
national sentiment. Drawing on centuries of intra-
Christian crusading, such crusades could be easily levied
against other Christian-led nations. They could also be
aimed at purported heresies—and the new “heresies”
sweeping Europe starting in the sixteenth century
alarmed many. From a historical perspective, of course,
these “heresies” were the Protestant Reformations.

Crusades against Protestants were called for, and not
only by the powerful or the popes; in the 1530s, rebels
of many classes who opposed Henry VII of England
and his religious agenda wore crusading badges during
the rebellion they called the “Pilgrimage of Grace.” And
although Protestants denied the papacy any right to wage
war, many of them nonetheless embraced the idea of
Christian holy war. Indeed, both Catholics and Protestants
rhetorically linked war against each other with war against
“the Turk.” This usually meant that both one’s Christian
opponent and the Ottomans were perceived as enemies,
but in a crisis, the Ottomans might even be considered
the lesser of two evils; for example, Pope Paul IV allied
with the Ottomans against his imperial adversaries,

34 Housley, Later Crusades, 97.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

174 | THE CRUSADES

the Habsburgs.** Once again, we are reminded that the
history of the crusades does not always conform to fault
lines expected in the modern era.

Was crusading on its way out? This is a difficult
question to answer. In the later Middle Ages and the
beginning of the early modern period, crusading as
a cultural phenomenon remained attractive to Latin
Christians and was acted upon at different social levels,
though admittedly the most effective enterprises were led
by the powerful. Crusading in the eastern Mediterranean
was as ineffective as ever, but crusading elsewhere was
remarkably successful and helped ensure a strong link
between crusading and national identities. One potential
end date for crusading was 1572, when Pope Pius IV
declared the last multinational crusade accompanied by
a grant of remission of sins to participants. Thus perhaps
we can say that after 1600, wars of Christian nationalism
replaced crusading. However, in 1645 crusade indulgences
were granted to those who defended Crete against the
Ottomans. Pushing the timeline even farther isthe fact that
while the Hospitallers had been displaced from Rhodes
by the Ottomans, they reestablished their order-state on
Malta in 1530 and remained there, a theocracy under the
rule of their grand-master and committed to their military
role, until 1798. As the conclusion discusses, the question
of when the history of the crusades ends and the memory
of the crusades begins is complicated and contentious.

35 Riley-Smith, Crusades, 319.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

TOWARDS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM | 175

Further Reading

Barber, Malcolm. The Trial of the Templars. 2nd ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Campbell, Bruce M. The Great Transition: Climate,
Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Einbinder, Susan L. No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature,
Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008.

Green, Monica H., ed. Pandemic Disease in the Medieval
World: Rethinking the Black Death. Kalamazoo:
ARC Medieval Press, 2015.

Grieve, Patricia E. The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins
in the History of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish
Conflict. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2009.

Hashmi, Sohail M., ed. Just Wars, Holy Wars, and Jihads:
Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Encounters and
Exchanges. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012.

Housley, Norman. The Later Crusades, 1274-1580: From
Lyons to Alcazar. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992.

Kafadar, Cemal. Between Two Worlds: The Construction
of the Ottoman State. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1995.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

176 | THE CRUSADES

Ozment, Steven. The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An
Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval
and Reformation Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1981.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Conclusion:

Have the Crusades
Ended?

““Crusade’ even in its most apparently benign usage

divides the world into black and white [...] it effaces

the nuance, the grey, in both our modern world and
the medieval one it purports to represent.”*°

CRUSADING INFLUENCED EUROPEAN NATIONAL
identities and European interactions with the rest of the
world in the early modern and modern eras. This lasting
impression is visible in not only the material cultures of
Europe and in a legacy of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim
ideologies and actions, but in European philosophy
and history. In eighteenth-century Europe, historians
like David Hume and Edward Gibbon disparaged the

36 Matthew Gabriele, “Debating the ‘Crusade’ in Contemporary
America,” The Medieval Journal 6: 1 (2016): 84.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

178 | THE CRUSADES

crusades as the opposite of the rational “Enlightenment”
they themselves hoped to promote. This disparagement
created an image of the crusades that has persisted to the
present, namely, that of barbaric wars fueled by greed
and religious fanaticism. From this perspective, these
unholy wars serve as the mascot for a murky Middle
Ages, a veritable Dark Age. In creating this image of
the crusades, eighteenth-century historians pulled on
medieval sources selectively, making use of those that
supported their perspective and ignoring—or unaware
of—counterevidence.

In contrast, nineteenth-century romanticism and
nationalism ushered in an era of increased positive
attention to the crusades in Europe. Romantic
writers like Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth
simultaneously glorified both the crusades and Salah
al-Din, whom they depicted as culturally and morally
sophisticated. Historians like Joseph Michaud used the
crusades to bolster contemporary national identity and
kindle nationalistic fervor. The great edited compilations
of crusading primary sources were constructed at the
same time as the great edited compilations of “national”
primary sources from the Middle Ages, and some
imperialists explicitly linked their enterprises to earlier
centuries of crusading. For example, L’Institut Religieux
et Militaire des Freres Armés du Sahara, a new military
order, was briefly created to promote Franco-Catholic
interests in Africa, while in England, Sir William Hillary
called for a new crusade to seize Acre from the Ottomans
and establish a new order-state centered on Jerusalem.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Conc.uston | 179

Unsurprisingly, then, in the nineteenth-century
the English word “crusade” acquired the broader,
romanticized meaning of a righteous pursuit of justice.
The romantic nationalists had generated a second image
of the crusades that has also persisted to the present.
Thus, in European history and memory, the eighteenth-
century image of unholy holy wars rubbed shoulders with
the nineteenth-century image of honorable, glorious, and
self-sacrificing quests to build a better world by using force
to smite the evildoer, defend the good, and liberate the
oppressed. In creating this nineteenth-century image of
the crusades, European historians, like their eighteenth-
century predecessors, used medieval sources selectively.

The crusades continued to be invoked as an historical
example for imperialist and other national or “Western”
military endeavors in the twentieth century. Jonathan
Riley-Smith has asserted that it was in the aftermath of
World War I that European nations and the United States
of America drew back from explicit comparison between
modern warfare and the crusades.*”7 However, such
comparisons actually carried on later into the twentieth
century; examples are as readily available as President
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1948 memoir of World War IH,
titled Crusade in Europe.** Indeed, in the early twenty-
first century American politicians on both right and left
have continued to discuss “crusading” either to support

37 Riley-Smith, Crusades, 344.

38 See also, particularly, Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold
Story of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1993).

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

180 | THE CRUSADES

or criticize American aggression.*” Meanwhile, as Andrew
Elliott has demonstrated, the crusades are heavily invoked
and reimagined by white nationalists across mass media
platforms.”

In Islamicate spheres, the crusades have also been
remembered in different ways and used to support
different contemporary agendas. Memories of the
crusades and of Salah al-Din in particular, as well as
“fears of renewed attack,” remained present in Islamic
popular and historical literature.“! These memories were
influenced—though not caused—by European cultural
trends in the nineteenth century; the romanticized
vision of bold yet culturally unsophisticated crusaders
encountering a superior and chivalric Salah al-Din
was particularly in line with existing trends in Islamic
historiography.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I gave
rise to both Arab Nationalism and Pan-Islamism, which
each remembered and reimagined the crusades. Both

39 Gabriele, “Debating the ‘Crusade’.”

40 Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media.
Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century
(Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017). See especially Chapters
4,6, and 7.

41 Diana Abouali, “Saladin’s Legacy in the Middle East,”
Crusades 10 (2011): 175-85, at 180. See also Konrad
Hirschler, “The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the
Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From
Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative,” Crusades 13 (2014),
37-76.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Conc.usion | 181

Arab Nationalists and Pan-Islamists oppose American
and European imperialism in its political and cultural
dimensions and both movements seek to build a unified
state in west Asia. Both also believe that such a state
would reflect the history of the region accurately. In
other words, from their perspective, such a state would
constitute a return to a better model rather than an
entirely unprecedented challenge to the imperialist status
quo. However, at the risk of overgeneralizing, while
Arab Nationalists seek to build a unified Arab nation,
Pan-Islamists seek to build a unified Islamic nation, i.e.,
a theocracy. In the later twentieth century, speaking
again in broad terms, Arab Nationalism lost ground to
Pan-Islamism.

Both Arab Nationalists and Pan-Islamists have
constructed and made use of their own images of the
crusades. For mid-twentieth-century thinkers like Sayyid
Qutb, the crusades were an ominous history, the victories
of Salah al-Din notwithstanding. Western imperialism/
intervention in majority Muslim regions—including, after
World War IL, the existence of the state of Israel—appeared
as the latest manifestation of “Crusading Spirit.’** Thus
the crusades became both an inspirational example from
the past and an ongoing and oppressive reality to fight in
the present. Political leaders, perhaps most notably Gamal
‘Abd al-Nasir, President of Egypt (1956-70), and Saddam
Hussein, President of Iraq (1979-2003), used words,
art, and in the case of al-Nasir, film to depict themselves
as modern Salah al-Dins. While twenty-first-century

42 Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, 269.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

182 | THE CRUSADES

militant groups like al Qaeda and IS do not share all
the same goals and ideals, they do share anti-crusading
rhetoric and imagery. Furthermore, they have effectively
used references to crusading in American and European
political discourse to bolster their claim that the crusades
are indeed ongoing and require armed resistance.*

In summary, then, there are a number of modern
actors worldwide who maintain that the crusades are
ongoing today, even if they disagree on whether that is
a reason to rejoice or an injustice to protest. Whether
rejoicing or protesting, these modern actors often see the
continuation of crusading as a reason to take up arms and
commit violence. And strictly speaking, these actors are
not completely fabricating the history of the crusades, but
rather—not unlike European historians in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries—they are seizing upon the
evidence they want to see and disregarding the rest.

One might hope that a historian’s perspective would
be clearer, but even as a historian, it is difficult to establish
a precise date at which the crusades can indeed be said
to have ended. If we apply pluralist criteria, it appears
that crusading ended in 1645. But the persistence of
Hospitaller Malta into the eighteenth century and the
nineteenth-century example of L’Institut Religieux et
Militaire des Freres Armés du Sahara make it difficult
to fix a concrete end date. Faced with this problem,
Jonathan Riley-Smith suggested two analytical categories
for modern phenomena: “para-crusading” (containing

43 Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media, especially
Chapters 5 and 8.

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Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

CoNcLUSION | 183

some “authentic elements”) and “pseudo-crusading”
(containing no “authentic elements,” just borrowed
rhetoric and imagery).* According to these categories,
L’Institut Religieux et Militaire des Fréres Armés du
Sahara was paracrusading, while Eisenhower’s choice of
book title was pseudocrusading.

This analytical model is quite unwieldy but that very
unwieldiness is illuminating. Clearly, even if we conclude
that the crusades ended in the mid-seventeenth century,
the legacy of crusading continues to unfold. As a result,
crusading cannot be decisively locked into the box of
the Middle Ages and the key thrown away; neither
can modern violence, rhetorical or physical, be neatly
detached from the premodern past. We are unavoidably
challenged to contend with complex and contested
ideas about the past alongside ongoing and horribly real
violence in the present.

I hope to have shown in this book that the complicated
nature of the crusades—the extreme multivalence of
crusading—long predates the modern era’s use of the
term and the history. Crusading emerged from a long
tradition of Christian violence and warfare, as well as
within a dynamic Mediterranean world. Crusading was
always viewed differently by different observers and
participants, and even in the Middle Ages, its history was
often linked to one political agenda or another. Those
Latin Christians who supported crusading utilized a
wide and variable set of ideas and cultural practices to
do so. Those outside the cultural boundaries of Latin

44 Riley-Smith, Crusades, 333-36.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

184 | THE CRUSADES

Christendom not only viewed the crusades in different
ways, but viewed them in ways that shifted over time,
as they variously found themselves allies or enemies of
crusaders. On all sides, some deliberately presented and
may well have fully believed in the crusading enterprise
as a categorical civilizational conflict. Yet given the ways
in which Latin Christians used crusading to further their
own political, economic, and social causes, including
against each other, and given the wide range of people
who participated in crusading, it is impossible to claim
that the crusades actually were categorical civilizational
conflicts, or even that all of those involved believed them
to be so. It is also impossible to claim that all the targets of
crusading violence necessarily interpreted every assault
they suffered as religious or cultural violence, as opposed
to violence motivated by political or economic concerns.
To emphatically quote historian Brian Catlos, “we should
not expect the people of the past to be any more coherent,
consistent, or comprehensible than those of today.”
When today the crusades are invoked in twenty-
first-century geopolitics, they are usually invoked, in the
words of Umej Bhatia, as a “poster-child of civilizational
conflict.” To depict crusading in this way does draw upon
some historical evidence—namely, the evidence that
presents the crusades in that way—but simultaneously
ignores the evidence for a much more complex and
interconnected past. These depictions also draw upon

45 Brian A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom,
c. 1050-1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), 520.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Conc.usIon | 185

all the images of crusading generated in the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In other words, when
we look at how the crusades are used in contemporary
geopolitics, we see both the influence of an incomplete
interpretation of the medieval past and the influence of
modern histories, ideologies, priorities, and practices.
Historians can counter the selective interpretation of the
past by providing a broader perspective, as this book has
sought to do, but that broader perspective will remain full
of complexity and ambiguity.

While recognizing that complexity and ambiguity
can be frustrating, these characteristics of the history
of the crusades may be uniquely valuable. Given the
effectiveness of ‘us vs. them’ rhetorics of religious violence
in the past and in the present, complexity and ambiguity
seem particularly constructive. They encourage us to
continue to ask questions, consider alternatives, rethink
conclusions, and acknowledge complications. The
very desire many clearly feel for crystalline clarity on
the question of “the crusades”—at its most extreme,
a desire for an ‘us vs. them’ past to support an ‘us vs.
them’ present—should urge us to recognize the variety of
ways in which history has been and still is mobilized for
polemical purposes and to incite violence. I hope that this
book leads you, the reader, to do all of these things as you
continue to explore the history of crusading for yourself.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

186 | THE CRUSADES

Further Reading

Bhatia, Umej. Forgetting Osama bin Munqidh,
Remembering Osama bin Laden: The Crusades in
Modern Muslim Memory. Singapore: S. Rajaratnam
School of International Studies, 2008.

Elliott, Andrew B.R. Medievalism, Politics and Mass
Media. Appropriating the Middle Ages in the
Twenty-First Century. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer,
2017.

Horswell, Mike, and Jonathan Phillips, eds. Perceptions of
the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First
Century. Oxon: Routledge, 2018.

Kayali, Hasan. Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism,
Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire,
1908-1918. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997.

Wien, Peter. Arab Nationalism. The Politics of History
and Culture in the Modern Middle East. London:
Routledge, 2017.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Index

Albigensian Crusade 114, 118, 120

Abbasids 20, 22, 88, 146

Almohads 83-84, 87-88, 97, 134, 136

Almoravids 28, 83-84, 87

Ayyubids 141-46

apocalypticism 48, 64

alliances (shifting and frequently inter-religious) 23, 38-
40, 54-58, 60, 75, 78, 82-83, 87, 89, 116, 142-45,
162-63, 172

Black Death 162-64
Byzantine Empire 23-24, 75, 90, 170
in the eleventh century 23-24
in the twelfth century 90-91
in the late thirteenth century 138, 140, 144
aims 55, 75-76, 87, 90
anti-Byzantine sentiment 91-92
anti-Latin sentiment 90-91
conflict with Normans 24, 45-47, 54, 62-63
infighting 55, 91-92, 117

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

188 | THE CRUSADES

relationship with crusaders 55-56, 75-76, 90-92
relationship with Venice 91, 117, 140, 168

Caliphate of Cordoba 26

Constantinople 23, 51, 54, 90, 91-92, 117-18, 137, 140,
170

Council of Clermont 45, 51-52

chivalry 105, 108, 110, 113, 158, 161

climate change 31, 145, 163

critics of crusading in Latin Christendom 114-15, 118,
120, 123, 131, 138

crusades against the Byzantines 95, 117, 122, 140

crusades against pagans in the Baltic region 24, 111-12,
69, 132, 134, 161

crusades in north Africa 164,171

crusading in Iberia (the “Reconquista”) 26, 28, 65,
69-70, 84, 134, 136, 164, 171

crusader states 56, 60, 74-75, 89, 94, 118, 136-37, 148
Antioch 56-57, 59, 75-76, 90
Edessa 56-57, 59, 67
Kingdom of Cyprus 94-95, 151, 156, 162, 163
Kingdom of Jerusalem 60, 89, 92-96, 137, 146,
148 162
Latin Empire 116-18, 137-38
See also military orders

crusading masculinities 108-09

defining the crusades 1-2, 4, 6, 101-04, 174, 178,
182-83
dhimmis 16,74

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

INDEX | 189

diplomacy 19, 54, 75, 76-79, 92, 96, 138, 140, 142-43,
145, 168

Dominican Order/Dominicans 120

Empire of Nicaea 138, 140

excommunication 39, 118, 124, 137

family 51, 52, 64, 107-09, 113, 126, 130

Fifth Crusade 123

First Crusade 1-2, 13, 37-38, 42-70
context 45-56
memory of the First Crusade 13, 47, 50, 52, 60
participants 50-51
(dis-)organization 51-52, 54, 56
reasons for success 58-59, 80
sources 47,49, 62-63

Fatimids 24, 26, 30, 48, 59, 88

Fourth Crusade 117

funding 103, 104, 107, 109, 117, 138, 141

Ghuzz (or Oghuz) Turks 20

heresy xiv
in Islamic regions 18,78
crusades against heretics 102, 112, 114, 118, 120,
166-67, 173

historiography and modern perceptions of the crusades
xiii-xv, 1-2, 4-6, 97, 99, 177-85
crusades as a civilizational clash 1, 6, 97, 100, 184
pluralist definition of crusading, 7, 9, 182
role of the historian 1-4, 6, 182

Holy Sepulcher 48, 54, 75, 89

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

190 | THE CRUSADES

holy war/just war
Christian traditions 7, 18-19, 34-35, 49, 120,
173-74
Islamic traditions (jihad) 18-19, 77-80, 82-83,
88

Hussite crusades 166-67

identity xiii-xv, 6, 20, 111-12, 173-74
Byzantine identity 23, 90
ethnic identities xvii, 18, 19, 20, 30
Norman identity 30
religious identity 19, 30, 82, 87, 163, 172-74, 184
See also piety
indulgences 102, 134, 174
Inquisition 112, 120
intra-Christian conflict 90, 93-94, 115-18, 120, 122-24,
134, 138, 140-41, 163-64, 173 and passim
Islamicate world xiv, 14-18
relations with non-Muslims 16-17, 48
See also dhimmis
Sunni and Shi‘ite divide 17-18, 83, 88

Khwarazmians 144

Granada 164, 171
Great Saljuqs 22, 26, 38-39, 46, 55, 59, 80

Jerusalem 7, 23, 48, 59, 64, 89
See also crusader states; Kingdom of Jerusalem

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

INDEX| 191

Jews 17, 32
Christian violence against 52, 54, 62, 69, 111,
113, 130, 172
under Islamicrule 16, 17
under Christian rule 32, 74, 111, 113, 172

leadership (or lack of) 52, 54, 56, 69, 96, 117, 131, 162
liberation rhetoric 48-50, 64, 68, 113, 132
local factors 22, 45, 56, 58, 92, 112, 166-67
logistics 54-55, 56-57, 69, 96, 103, 117-18, 141
land route 51, 70, 90, 115
searoute 90, 94
lower social orders’ participation in the crusades 51, 55,
58, 110, 131
asaform of rebellion 131, 167

Mamluks 141, 144-50

Marinids 136, 164

marriage 19, 88, 93-94, 108, 117, 124, 168, 171

massacres 52, 59, 62,91, 96

memory of the crusades in the Middle Ages 8, 44, 60, 86
in Jewish communities 62
inthe Byzantine Empire 46, 62-63, 86-87, 137
in Latin Europe 51, 63-65, 86, 101, 106-07, 112,
183

memory of the crusades in the Islamic world 60, 62,
82-83, 86, 89, 180-81

migration and colonization 20, 32, 75, 92, 106, 134, 162,
172

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

192 | THE CRUSADES

military orders 65, 110, 134
Hospital of St. John (Hospitallers) 65, 110, 162,
170, 174
Knights Templars 65, 110
Sword-Brothers 134
Mongols 145-46, 148
motivations 49-53, 58, 62, 64, 79, 122-23, 126, 132, 138
economic/financial motivations 58, 84, 86,
105-06, 132, 140, 164
expansionary/territorial motivations 57, 120,
132, 134, 136, 164, 171
See also family; nobility; piety; vengeance
Muslims under Christian rule 32, 74, 111, 172

nationalism and proto-nationalism 112-13, 166, 171,
173-74, 178, 180

nobility 33-35, 37, 45, 50, 65, 105, 118
relationship with church 33-35, 37, 45
leadership in the crusades 52, 69, 117-18, 120
crusading identity 107-08, 310

Normans 24, 26, 30, 38-39, 46, 63

origins of crusades 1-2, 45-47, 43-70 (esp. 52, 60,
63-66), 101
Ottoman Turks 166-70

pacifism 40

papacy 35,45
anti-popes 37-38
conflict with emperors (Investiture Conflict)
35-38, 45, 49, 124, 126

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

INDEX | 193

authority to direct Christian violence 38-39,
43-46, 49-51, 101-02, 120, 131

Peace of God/Truce of God 34, 48

penance 34, 49, 102
penitential violence 49-50, 64, 104

piety 28, 58, 32-33, 49-50, 87, 104, 113-14, 116, 122,
126

pilgrimage 30, 48, 49, 63-64, 67, 76, 101, 162

Pilgrimage of Grace 167, 173

preaching 43-45, 47, 49, 51, 68, 103

milites Christi (“soldiers of Christ”) 33, 50
mujahid (“warrior in jihad”) 82-83, 89

Realpolitik 8,78, 116
See also alliances; diplomacy; violence
relics 58, 104, 118, 130
religious conversion 14, 52, 132, 146
religious reform movements 33-36, 45, 48, 101-03

salvation 33, 49, 64, 104

Second Crusade 67-69

sectarian divisions within Christianity xiv, 18, 23, 39-40,
75, 117, 140, 163, 166

Seventh Crusade 130

simony 33

slavery 14, 26, 110, 144, 172

sources 47, 49,78, 89, 101, 109-11, 113-14, 178-79

succession disputes 22, 26, 55, 91, 93, 142, 144, 167

taifa kingdoms 26, 28, 83-84

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

194 | THE CRUSADES

taxation 16, 74-75, 103, 138, 141

technology 31, 106, 170

tolerance 16-17, 19, 26, 32, 48, 74, 78, 83, 106, 111

towns and city states 16, 23, 30, 32, 132, 162

trade 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 24, 32, 91, 105-06, 132, 137, 162,
170, 172

vengeance 62, 64, 96, 113-14
Venice 32,91, 117, 156, 163, 170, 172
violence 6, 19, 113-14,
Christian violence 18, 34-35, 38, 104, 113-14
See also just war
nobility and violence 34-35, 50, 105
societal violence 34, 113-14
See also penitential violence
vows 34-35, 51, 58, 101, 109, 124

women’s participation in crusades 51, 69, 92-93,
109-10, 131, 171

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

Credits

Cover created by Kismet Press from: 1) Al-Idrisi's world
map from ’Ali ibn Hasan al-Hifi al-Qasimi’s 1456 copy:
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Al-idrisi_
world_map.jpg>. The manuscript (Paris, Bibliotheque
nationale de France, Arabe 2221) containing the map
may be viewed online on the Gallica website: <https://
gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6000547t.r=.langEN>.
The original was created by the geographer Abu Abdullah
Muhammad al-Idrisi al-Qurtubi al-Hasani as-Sabti (1100-
1165/66) at the court of King Roger II of Sicily (1095-
1154). Original image in the public domain, edited by
Kismet Press, and republished under the same license.

Frontispiece created by Kismet Press from: 1) a
seventeenth-century manuscript copy of Ibn al-Wardi’s
world map from his Kharidat al-‘Aja'ib wa faridat al-
gha'raib (The Pearl of Wonders and the Uniqueness
of Strange Things): <https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Ibn_Wardi_mappa_mundi.jpeg>;
2) Al-Idrisi's world map from ’Ali ibn Hasan al-Hifi al-
Qasimi’s 1456 copy: <https://commons.wikimedia.org/

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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196 | THE CRUSADES

wiki/File:Al-idrisi_world_map.jpg>. The whole work
can be viewed online on the Bibliothéque nationale de
France’s_ website: <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/
btv1b6000547t.r=.langEN>; 3) a diagram of the four
seasons and four cardinal directions, from a copy of
Isidore's De natura rerum: London, British Library,
Harley MS 3099, fol. 156%: see <https://blogs.bl.uk/
digitisedmanuscripts/2017/03/female-scribes-in-
early-manuscripts-.html> and the whole manuscript
on the British Library’s website: <https://www.bl.uk/
manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_3099>;
4) A world map from Leinhart Holle's 1482 edition of
Ptolemy's Geography: Holle's entire Cosmographia may
be viewed online at the Internet Archive: <https://
archive.org/details/cosmographia00ptol>; the map can
be found at <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Claudius_Ptolemy-_The_World.jpg>. The map goes
back to Ptolemy (100-ca.170) via the Byzantine translator
Maximus Planudes (ca.1260-ca.1305), the Italian
humanist Jacobus Angelus/Jacopo d'Angelo (1360-1411),
and German cartographer Nicolaus Germanus (ca.1420-
ca.1490). Original images in the public domain, edited by
Kismet Press, and republished under the same license.

Maps are by Kismet Press, based on those created by
Koba-chan from the public domain DEMIS Mapserver.
The full set may be found online here: <https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_the_World/Physical_and_
topographical>. These maps were released by Koba-chan
under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license and the maps in this book
are therefore released under the same license.

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

This sweeping yet succinct new survey
introduces readers to the history of the crusades
from the eleventh to the twenty-first century. By
synthesizing a variety of historical perspectives,
the book deliberately locates crusading in the
broader history of the Mediterranean, moving
away from approaches focused primarily on
narrating the deeds of a small section of the
Latin Christian elite to explore the rich and
contested complexity of crusade history.

Susanna A. Throop is Associate Professor
and Department Chair of History at Ursinus
College. She is the author of Crusading as an
Act of Vengeance, 1095-1216, and co-editor of
Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion
and Feud and The Crusades and Visual Culture.

Kismet Press is a not-for-profit partnership
committed to publishing high-quality, peer-
reviewed works in the arts and humanities, and
making them as accessible as possible, both in
print and open access online.

Libera Scientia | Free Knowledge

Susanna A. Throop. The Crusades: An Epitome. Epitomes 4. Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Available at https://kismet.press/portfolio/the-crusades.

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